The signature culture at my company is dangerously close to ridiculous, and this question made me ask about it here.
We're an MS Gold Ultra Colour Plus(tm)(c)(fm)(wtf) Partner which is apparently an important marketing point, and a bunch of my colleagues have a wide array of certifications and other stuff they're very obviously proud of.
The problem is that it overcrowds the actual content in our email correspondence.
Thus, my question:
How do I, as a relatively new hire (5 months), convince the company (and esp. certain heavyweight individuals) to reform the Corporate Email Signature standard?
Below is a sample email that's common enough. The orange box denotes the actual content of the email. The green box denotes the amount of screen real estate typically available for reading email, when I'm not popping the email out into a separate window (which I did only for the screenshot, normally the main window is all I have). Everything below the green box is off-screen and requires scrolling. Take a good look.
Can you imagine scrolling through a long(-ish) discussion full of these signatures? It's difficult to focus on the actual content!
Plus, of course, they're taking up disk space (not so bad in itself, but times a thousand, times their uselessness when used for internal communication...)
Update: Yes, that is an actual (but obfuscated) example. I am delighted to have brightened up your day. I will not be trying to upstage them; on the contrary I use a very simple signature for internal mails, and a slightly less very simple signature for external mails. Frankly, I don't care about all those badges and am happy to see that most of you agree that it's "noise". More updates follow when I have more time.
Update 2: Obfuscated further. And I noticed that I received a close vote.
Update 3: I wish I could accept more than a single answer. Thank you so much. I've (carefully) asked about, and others have noticed the same thing and agree with me. I've talked to my direct manager and she will take it up with management (our org chart is very shallow).