Email Signature Information

In the UK, if your business is a private limited company (Ltd) or public limited company (PLC)  or a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP), the Companies Act 1985 requires that your letterhead, order forms and all business emails include the following details in legible characters:

• Your company name
• Your company registration number
• Your place of registration (e.g. Scotland or England & Wales)
• Your registered office address – This may be different to the office that you trade from

There is clarification on this requirement on the Out-Law website. This information should also appear on your company’s website. Failure to comply with these requirements puts your company at risk of a fine. These duties were clarified on 1 January 2007, as a result of an amendment that was made to the Companies Act to comply with a European Directive.

Typically this information is in a smaller font to the rest of your email and is below your personal details of your signature.

Typical Email Signature

So a complete email signature might look like:

Optional email signature information

As well as the information in your email signature that you are legally required to include some people will also include disclaimer information. This includes information like:-

Email Disclaimer

This message contains confidential information and is intended only for sales@akcsl.com. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. AK Computer Services Ltd cannot accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which may arise as a result of e-mail transmission. Please note that AK Computer Services Ltd may monitor, analyse and archive email traffic, data and the content of email for the purposes of security, legal compliance and staff training.

Green IT Statement

Please consider the environment before printing this email

Marketing Information

Microsoft Gold Partner & Systems Management Specialists: Find out more about Microsoft System Center Operations Manager & SystemAssure, our Managed IT Service, at  www.akcsl.com

Email Legal Compliance

In terms of overall legal compliance there are other things that you may be required to do, in addition to the compliance issues around your email signature. These include:-

• email Archive
• Subject Access Requests under the Data Protection Act
• Notification of Monitoring

These other legal compliance subjects will be discussed in future posts within the Computer Spot blog.

Email Signature Update

Auto-Responders

Don’t forget that you need to include the legally required information in the email signature of any email auto-responders that you may have.

Email Newsletters

If you send email news letters to your customers you should also include the same email signature information in all of your newsletters that you send. Ideally for all email Newsletters you should use a product designed specifically for sending bulk emails like Aweber or Constant Contact.

Create your own Legally Compliant email signature

You can create your own, personalised, email signature which includes all of the things discussed above by using our email signature generator. You can then use these email signatures in your company email footer, auto-responders and newsletters.

Download our Business Email Checklist

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