With every best wish, is a good email sign-off. What does your sign-off say about you?

There’s been a sudden spate of articles about the good practice, and even etiquette on how you sign-off emails.

Salutations and their use have been a topic of etiquette for decades. More recently, their use in emails has been reviewed in – You’re ending your emails wrong – in Bloomberg Business, which was quickly taken up in i100 with – You have been signing off your emails the wrong way, and in the Daily Telegraph with – Your email sign-off is ‘vulgar and lazy’. Here’s how to do it properly.

Having been a borough councillor I always considered my sign-off to be almost as important as the content of the email. Showing courtesy and respect is obviously necessary, but as is exhibiting empathy, which can come in the warmth of the sign-off.

All the articles bemoan the use of ‘best’, which I have on occasion used, though felt uncomfortable doing so. Perhaps it’s the brevity, and maybe it also lacks the empathy that I feel is important.

We’re all taught from a young age to use please and thank you, so signing off thank you is traditional and courteous. Inter-office email sign-off’s can be brief or might be non-existent, which’ll depend to some extent on office practice.

As you might imagine, I like the more carefully thought about sign-off’s, and consider, ‘regards’, ‘kind regards’, ‘best wishes’, and so on to be dull. Forbes quotes 89 ways to Sign Off an Email. All a bit US-slanted for my taste. Net Manners offers more variety.

I’ve come to use a combination of these words, warmest, kind, regards, good, wish, and wishes. My current favourites are, ‘With every good wish’, and ‘With warmest kind regards’.

I’m thinking about using ‘pip-pip’ or ‘toodle-oo’. To friends, of course.