There’s a reason you should always include ‘Sent from my iPhone’ when emailing people

It’s almost second nature to some of us to delete that ‘Sent from my iPhone’ under our email while we’re typing away.

Maybe you think it makes you look less professional or perhaps you don’t want your boss to know you’re sat on your phone rather than laptop. Or, possibly, it’s simply just something that gets on your nerves.

The whole ‘Sent from my iPhone’ thing became a bit of a meme recently too, following the release of hit Netflix miniseries Baby Reindeer.

During the true story-inspired show, Martha the stalker sends over 41,071 emails to Donny Dunn.

And every email shown in the drama was actually sent by the real woman to Richard Gadd and at the end of each one, she signs it off with 'Sent from my iPhone' (or sometimes just 'iphon').

It's tempting to quickly delete.

This is despite her not even emailing from an iPhone, or owning one.

So, while that might have put you off ever including that part of the message again, there’s a reason you should.

An expert in ‘professional email writing’ has explained you should always include ‘Sent from my iPhone’ when emailing people.

Rob Ashton writes that if you don’t include that line you should at least ‘indicate that you’re sending the message from some sort of mobile device’.

And it all comes down to the mistakes we might make while typing out an email on our phones.

A study in 2012 measured the damage on a sender’s credibility ‘as well as their competence and the prestige of the sender’s employer’.

Those errors were found do have a ‘damaging effect’ in those areas.

“But, despite the number of mistakes, the presence of ‘Sent from my iPhone’ significantly reduced that damage,” Ashton writes.

He says you should leave the message in. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

So, those results prove that if you indicate your sending a message from your phone, then ‘your reader will generally forgive the odd mistake’.

Because sure, the odd typo in a text we’re not too bothered about but we’ll often be a little stricter when it comes to emails.

“But the implications of this and similar studies go way beyond showing that it’s a good idea to indicate that you are emailing from a mobile device,” Ashton adds.

“Because they show that the unintentional cues we send out when we write or speak have a huge impact on how our audience perceives what we’re trying to say. In communication, first and foremost, it’s the little things that count.”

*Not sent from my iPhone*

Topics: Technology, Baby Reindeer

Jess Battison

Jess is an Entertainment Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include keeping up with the Twitter girlies, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021 and has previously worked at MyLondon.

@jessbattison_