Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Protocol.by Turns Your Email Signature into a Guide to How to Reach You
Lifehacker: New web service Protocol.by helps you generate email signatures that link to your account at the service, and that contain the information your email recipients need to best contact you, and the order in which they should try.
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4 comments:
I may be missing something here, but I'm not sure how this is much different from simply putting your contact information in the signature line of an email, which you can set up in your already existing email provider instead of having a whole link for it. I know a lot of people probably wouldn't follow the link anyway, unless they knew that was exactly what it was for. I guess having a link would eliminate the multi-lined signature, but you can figure out other ways of making your email more aesthetically pleasing if that is your concern. This just seems like an unnecessary extra step.
I agree with the previous comment here. Not only are email signatures kind of outdated (younger companies, as far as my experience goes, usually will just tell you their contact information in the body of the email), but this whole tool just seems like a lot of work for not a lot of result. It also seems kind of presumptuous to me- I would sooner ask the email recipient to look at my work if they were interested with a sentence then to add a link which they may or may not scroll down to read or be motivated to click.
I think this is completely ridiculous. If it is someone you don't know, dumping them on a website to tell them how to contact you is rude. If it is someone you do know, they should know how to contact you. And if they don't know how to reach you by any of the methods in your signature already, they probably won't know how to use this service.
I do however think that having at least one method of contact in every email is important. People access e-mails in different ways and having a plain text/written version of the information is imperative an many of these methods.
I do not understand the need for this application. Why would you want to send a client or and employer to a separate website in order for them to figure out how to contact you. E-mail signatures may be too "simple" or "old" for some, but it is convenient to see the information right there. Technology is attempting to direct everything through an App rather than keeping something that has proved to work in the past. It is not difficult to either include contact information in a set signature or to give it to them by letting them know in your message. This method is more personal and I think less off putting than making them jump through another hoop to figure out how to reach you. They have others with their contact info right there, why would they want to go through something extra just for you? To sum it all up, the old cliche, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," works nicely.
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