[Heather Cox]

As an IT company, we deal in email a lot, and we manage a lot of mail servers, both on site and in house. We use an HTML signature on our email, and have had no signature based issues with our email being received, nor any clients having issues receiving emails with HTML signatures.

What you might find is that recipients are asked to "right click to download picture" if you embed HTML images in your signature. This type of security has been put in place to ensure that emails aren't rejected just because they contain links, but are converted to be less 'threatening' to the system.

In my opinion, a sleek HTML signature looks very professional, where a plain HTML signature just isn't as impressive, but either done badly will work against you (smilies are a no-no!) and might be worst than no signature at all. My preference is for minimalism, and probably because I read email almost all day I really hate backgrounds - bumps up the size of the email and makes it harder to read for no functional purpose.