How many times have you received an email with a large attachment, only to find the attachment is simply a company logo? Or worse still, a badly formatted HTML “corporate e-mail footer” with the popular 250 word, or more, disclaimer.

Whilst there are “branding” advantages to these footers – they often take up more space than the actual email content itself, and they can rapidly clog up your valuable storage space whilst really, and effectively, using up your available internet transfer bandwidth. When you multiply the problem by the number of email enabled employees it becomes much worse. The problem is bad in an SME (Small Medium Enterprise) environment so we can only imagine how much wasted resource a large corporate has to contend with.

However, it doesn’t stop there – worse still are images which are not embedded in the email but instead pull content directly from a website, located somewhere in cyber space. If you have ever wondered why they do this don’t just include the image as part of the communication it’s worth noting that this method is often used to track email – so be careful if you tell your trading partner “Oh I never received or read that email” – the moment you looked at the email (even on your preview pane) the URL associated with the image was activated and your IP address was added to your partner’s email metrics.

You can sometimes opt in or out of certain parts of the footer, depending on your company policies, but some businesses automatically add an over-riding footer to all outgoing electronic mail. If your environment does this then make sure they know how to detect footers that already exist – as a small, seemingly innocent, email exchange can soon become a huge drain on your IT resources – as footer after footer is added to the communication (made worse if your communication partner does the same).

Back to the argument of “branding” and company image which is often used to support a case for custom electronic mail footers – but is branding really required in a simple electronic communication, or is it better served on company letter heads, and compliment slips?

If you are one of the unfortunates whose company policy dictates you must use HTML format for all electronic mail communications (to ensure the custom footer works properly) then it’s worth noting that malware can be easily carried through HTML based content so allowing them in to your email system immediately increases your exposure to risk.

So what is your view? Are dressed up email footers a bad thing or a good thing?