Emoji in an Email Signature

Emoji are text characters, not images, so they travel through email reliably and display in nearly every modern client. That makes them a tempting shortcut for icons: a phone emoji before the number, an envelope before the email address, a pin before the address. They come with trade-offs. Each platform draws emoji in its own style, so the same character looks different on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung devices, and older Outlook versions on Windows may show a monochrome version. Screen readers announce emoji by name, so a phone emoji is read aloud as telephone receiver before every number, which adds noise for people using assistive technology. Some recipients and many industries read emoji as informal, and a signature appears on every message, including serious ones. Emoji can also be mangled when a signature is copied between tools with the wrong character encoding, producing replacement characters. The practical guidance: in a personal or creative signature, one or two emoji are fine; in a business signature, use plain text labels such as M: and E:, or small icon images with alt text, and keep emoji out of the name and title.