57 Ways to Sign Off on an Email

Of course, you’ve all read Send and have a firm grounding in email etiquette. Now it’s time for a special seminar. The topic? Closings, the often overlooked cherry on the email sundae.

Susan Adams at Forbes writes:

Here are my four rules for signing off on emails:

Don’t include quotes.
Avoid oversized corporate logos. Sometimes we have no choice about this, because our companies insist we include these things, but if they are too big, they draw the eye away from the message.
Include your title and contact info, but keep it short. In most business emails, you’re doing the person a favor by sharing your vital information. But make it minimal. Mine just says, “Susan Adams, Senior Editor, Forbes 212-206-5571.” A short link to your website is fine but avoid a laundry list of links promoting your projects and publications.
Do include some kind of sign-off. Mark Hurst, 40, author of Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, says the function of a sign-off is to signal the end of a message, so the recipient knows it didn’t get short-circuited. “To me the sign-off is not so much style as function in the service of clearly communicating your message,” he says.

Etiquette consultant Lett advocates a more formal approach. “I don’t believe emails are conversations,” she says. “They’re letters.” I disagree. Emails are their own form of communication and they’re evolving fast. Farhad Manjoo, 35, Wall Street Journal technology columnist and until recently, the voice behind a Slate podcast, “Manners for the Digital Age,” puts it well: “An email is both a letter and an instant message,” he observes.

All of that said, here is a list of common and not-so-common email sign-offs, with commentary and notes from the experts.

To read the list, view the full article at Forbes.