Signature block

Short for 'signature'. It refers to a few lines of text at the bottom of an email message or Usenet postings. It traditionally contains contact information about the author of the message and optionally, a witty or profound statement.

Traditionally, nettiquete dictates that sig blocks be no more than 4 lines to conserve bandwith, although this is frequently ignored these days. Netiquette still frowns upon long sigs, but for different reasons: in threaded discussions, people don't like to read a paragraph of post and a page of sig.

Sigs often contain ASCII art.

See LSTDPCA