How to send a contract for signature by email

The attachment lands on three machines. One opens it in Preview, one in Chrome, one in ancient Word. Two sign on paper and scan. One edits clause 4 and sends 'the final'. Your inbox is now a version-control system with no rules.

Email is a bad vault and a good doorbell. Use it to say something is waiting, not to be the archive. The link points at one PDF. Fields sit where they should. When everyone has tagged, you get one file out, not an archaeological dig through attachments.

People are also rightly afraid of weird attachments. A clean link from a name they know, with a sentence about the subject, gets opened. A zip called contract_sign.zip does not. That is healthy, and you should not fight it.

The right file. Not the draft with yellow comments. Not a Word still tracking changes. Export or upload the thing that will actually govern. Read page two. That is where people hide the notice period.

The right people. Names and emails they actually read. Not info@ if Lina is the one who can bind the company — unless Lina has said info@ is her queue. Role: signer, cc, maybe approver. Cc marked as 'must sign' is how jobs hang for three weeks.

Deadline and order. A link with no date is a link people look at on a Monday in two weeks. Say it in the email too, not only in the tool. Humans read inboxes, not your settings.

A subject a human gets: 'April engagement contract — signature by Thursday'. Body: one sentence on what, one on why now, one that they open the link and tag without creating an account if that is true. If it requires BankID, say so. Surprises at step two are how people bounce.

Do not paste a legal novel. The document is the novel. The email is the doormat. If you need to explain three exceptions, they belong in the contract or in a meeting, not in an invitation to click.

Send from a name they know. 'noreply-system-transactional' looks like spam. If the tool lets you set a from-name, use the human, not the brand alone.

People have learned to distrust links. Good. You counter that with a heads-up: 'in five minutes you will get a link from X, it is real'. Or by having the first email come from you, with the tool as the next step.

Some products send a one-time code. It is annoying and it cuts off a pile of accounts created on a guessed address. SES does not become QES because of a code. It becomes less porous.

If the other person calls to ask whether the link is real, answer on the phone with the URL stem, not 'just click'. Trust is a human who knows your voice, not a logo in a template.

Parallel: everyone gets the link, done when the slowest is done. Good for equals, a board, two founders who already agree. Sequential: A must finish before B sees it. Good when B is only guaranteeing what A already accepted, or when internal counsel must see the last draft before the CEO.

Do not mix. If you send parallel and then phone people to 'wait for the boss', you have invented sequence in your head and chaos in the tool. Choose, show it in the email, live with it.

Reminders: one is adult. Three is nagging. If they do not sign, it is often the text, not the inbox. Call before you spam. Void the job if it is dead, so it does not glow 'waiting' for three months.

The signed PDF, to every party, the same file. If you have an evidence pack or a receipt, send it as an attachment or a link — and say honestly what it is: log and hash, not QES, not BankID, unless it actually is.

Do not ask them to 'print and file'. They can save the PDF. If PAdES sits in the file, they carry a tamper signal with them. If the proof only lives at the vendor, say how long you think it lives, without promising eternity.

Archive it yourself too. Tools vanish. Inboxes too. One folder, one job id, done. Future you will say thanks.