At my last place of employment, a usability consultancy, I remember having a discussion with my colleagues about having images in our email signatures. I never thought images would come up and that we would all agree that they were not the best idea but there were more than a few of them who liked the idea of sticking the corporate logo in there, along with colouring the text appropriately, but I didn’t. Amongst my arguments were:

• They add additional file size to the email (albeit a small amount the recipient has no choice in it and they pay for their data downloads),
• Email replies can become messy and difficult,
• Screen readers may not deal with them well
• Newer email clients do not display images by default (as they are used to confirm email addresses by spammers), and
• The killer for me, all emails with images in them display as having attachments – which is one of the main ways I use to scan and find old emails.

Sure the logo in there looks nice but that’s where the value ends…in my opinion.

*end rant*