Signature block

"Traditional" internet cultural .sig practices assume the use of monospaced ASCII text because they pre-date MIME and the use of HTML in email.

In this tradition, it is common practice for a signature block to consist of one or more lines containing some brief information on the author of the message such as phone number and email address, URLs for sites owned or favoured by the author—but also often a quotation (occasionally automatically generated by such tools as fortune), or an ASCII art picture.

These are typically couched in legal jargon, but it is unclear what weight they have in law, and they are routinely lampooned.

[3][4] Business emails may also use some signature block elements mandated by local laws: A party can sign a document for the purposes of Section 4 [of the Statute of Frauds] by using his full name or his last name prefixed by some or all of his initials or using his initials, and possibly by using a pseudonym or a combination of letters and numbers (as can happen for example with a Lloyds slip scratch), providing always that whatever was used was inserted into the document in order to give, and with the intention of giving, authenticity to it.

as overly bureaucratic, these regulations only extend existing laws for paper business correspondence to email.

It allows software to automatically mark or remove the sig block as the receiver desires.

Depending on the board's capabilities, signatures may range from a simple line or two of text to an elaborately constructed HTML piece.