[otherdave]

What about when you get an email from a website you just signed up for that opens with "Hi, Anigbrowl! I saw that you signed up for my site..." and is "signed" by the CEO. If you found out that was an automated email and that the CEO didn't really type it up personally, would you be equally upset?

[mrfusion]

I got one of those and at the bottom it said "do not reply to this email." I thought that was pretty funny.

[michaelbuckbee]

I have the opposite issue, I'm constantly sending out personal emails asking to help people with getting setup (it's for Heroku SSL stuff and people often misconfigure things) and can't get a response from them.

[phreanix]

Write a really short sentence and your signature should say "sent from my iPhone"

[notahacker]

This. More generally, the less attention that goes into perfecting the layout and wording, the more likely the reader is to believe you're on a busy human's to do list and not a mailing list.

HTML layout very bad, neat little bullet points bad, good copy bad, lack of line spacing and excessive terseness good.

[jimmaswell]

So basically be as inefficient as possible

[manicdee]

Be as efficient as possible.

Don't waste time on presentation, so you don't feel like a marketroid.

[anigbrowl]

When it's pretty obviously a form letter it doesn't bother me much. The nature of email is such that I know the same letter may be going to many thousands of people, or that large chunks of it might have been cut-n-pasted.

What I'm saying is that the more personal-seeming it appears, the more attention the reader is likely to pay. An actual handwritten letter presents as a highly personal communication. Even where it's justa courtesy note, it says that the other person values your business enough to take time to literally put pen to paper. For example, a few times I've bough a used book via Amazon and it arrived with a hand-written note of the 'thank you, hope you enjoy it' variety. It may be done by some junior employee, but any firm that does that goes straight into my 'preferred sellers' list because it's a rare flourish of personal courtesy in a world where most things are mass produced and commoditized.

[isaacremuant]

I don't get offended like above poster but I do think that if something is "signed" by a person in a position of power then that person should be aware what is being said in his name and be fully responsible to deal with whatever consequence it entails.