digg

Join DiggAbout

Discover the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.

Rich HTML signatures for Gmail

5thirtyone.com — One of the benefits of using a dedicated email application like Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird is the ability to send emails which included rich HTML signatures. Unfortunately, because I managed all my email accounts via Gmail ’s web interface, the option was non-existent. That was until I discovered the Better Gmail Firefox extension.

Bury
show profanity settings
expand all
  • varish, on 10/11/2007, -30/+7no comments and on the front page?

    on a more related note, i never really used sigs, maybe its tine i start using them?
    • mikes1, on 10/11/2007, -13/+54Please, no. (unless you want to look really clueless)

      http://www.efn.no/html-bad.html
    • varish, on 10/11/2007, -6/+25plan text email then :) i was under the false impression that using sigs are cool after reading the article :P
    • l1wulf, on 10/11/2007, -12/+7@mikes1:
      Uh, clueless... Um, yeah. Most of the points in the link you provided are outdated--take point #5:
      "A posting with HTML-coded (stylized) text is 4-5 times as big as the same posting in plain text - this adds up to a big increase in disk usage, and in download time for such postings. As pay-per-volume is getting more and more common, this is not only a waste of time, but also of money. Also, many people still use modems, and are then slowed even more down by all the HTML code. Contribute to a faster, less expensive Internet by using plain text."

      Additionally, nearly half of the issues are regarding listservs, including one begging us to not forget about our blind brethren on these listservs unable to have the HTML email encoded into braille.

      I would think that if somone is posting to a listserv in HTML and it's an issue, someone will point it out and it will be remedied, so blind and seeing will be OK and able to read Joe poster is writing.
    • resplence, on 10/11/2007, -12/+7Yeah, start using signatures when they become even more annoying.

      Thanks for another non-feature, GMail.
    • theOster, on 10/11/2007, -10/+6i love nothing more than destroying html emails that come my way >:)

      that warning that "some formatting will be lost" makes me giggle like a school girl
    • SteveMax, on 10/11/2007, -3/+29@resplence
      That's not a Gmail feature. Gmail explicitly disallows HTML signatures. This is a Firefox extension that adds them (as in, "add a bunch of HTML to the bottom of all outgoing e-mail). Don't blame Google for this, blame the stupid kid who thinks this is a good idea, and the other stupid kid who programmed it.
    • Charlotte_Web, on 10/11/2007, -6/+2Hmmm... the Greasemonkey page is dead, so I can't test this out.

      On a related note, I hope there's a script that places your signature at the TOP of your page rather than the bottom. Nobody is going to scroll all the way down through quoted messages to see my signature. Why does GMail even have a signature feature if it's always going to place it at the bottom of all the quoted messages?

      "Please, no. (unless you want to look really clueless)"

      Hey, some of us actually use our Gmail accounts for BUSINESS. Having a signature with all of your contact info there is quite handy.

      I've often pulled up a random email from somebody I'm trying to contact and gotten their phone number from their signature.
    • SteveMax, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8Do you sign your memos at the top of the page, too?
    • fangorious, on 10/11/2007, -4/+3@charlotteweb

      We're not railing against sigs, we're railing against html sigs. I'd like to think that people I'm doing business with have more important things to do than postulate on the best background color and cursive font to put at the end of an email. Plain text gets the contact info across just as effectively.

      And putting it at the top would make it letterhead, not a signature. Semantic difference but they have distinct names to avoid confusion.
    • Charlotte_Web, on 10/11/2007, -3/+12"Do you sign your memos at the top of the page, too?"

      No, but then again, I don't copy the letter I'm replying to verbatim, either.

      "We're not railing against sigs, we're railing against html sigs."

      It amazes me we live in a world where on-demand video over the internet is commonplace, but puting a simple image in an email is hard to do.

      sometimes, I just want to attach an image and write some text next to it.

    • resplence, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3stevemax is right. digg him up and bury me for being everything I dislike in a digger :(
    • changyang1230, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3@charlotte_web

      Your answer was answered by wiihuck below, I would just elaborate a bit on what he said:

      The signature being located at the bottom in a reply message has always been a nuisance to many people, and the "better gmail" extension has an option to move the signature to where it should be. Better gmail extension, by the way, is a great extension which combines some of the best gmail greasemonkey scripts in one place.

      Better Gmail extension:
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4866

      The standalone "signature float" greasemonkey script:
      http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3067
    • Moby22, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1@mikes1,

      With all due respect to Thomas Gramstad, when he wrote that article he has some valid points, most of which had to do with being considerate to others. The problem is that the article is outdated (written five years ago). E-mail standards have come a long way since then. The reason consideration was needed at the time was because many recipients were running clients that adhered to older standards.

      According to current standards, a properly written client should be able to handle various MIME types properly, including throwing out any non-text content if the user desires (Gramstad even makes this point). Thus, blind users and mailing lists can still read HTML-encoded e-mail, as long as it is accompanied by the appropriate plain text body. Of course, this depends on the originating client being smart enough to generate the plain text body when it generates the HTML body, as well as the receiving client being recent enough to comply with current standards.

      Most of Gramstad's comments deal with specific technology that is now in minority use, if at all. However, he makes some points that are still valid, such as spam and virus concerns, but these are being dealt with effectively using methods employed by the receiving clients. Even his concern about allowing the user to control the look of the e-mail can be resolved with current technology such such as user-defined style sheets, or again by simply discarding the HTML content body in favour of the plain text one.

      There are still problems with HTML-formatted e-mail, but they are constantly being reduced as application developers improve their e-mail clients. In my opinion, e-mail will be an eternal thorn in the Internet's side. The truth is that the concept of e-mail (a public address to which anyone can send content) is inherently flawed, which is to say that by nature it invites abuse - in a similar system, junk mail invades your physical post mailbox, even after all these years. Our emerging technologies for counteracting malicious code and spammy messages are on the right path to minimizing the problem, but no technology can solve it completely, even by replacing the current ARPA-generation of standards. The question is, how do we cope with these problems on the social level, rather than the technical one? Perhaps we shun e-mail entirely for an invitation-only system (not unlike current IM technology, which even allows for offline messaging and message archiving these days). Only time will tell.
  • kuroaisu, on 10/11/2007, -11/+9And who says Digg isn't massaged by hand.. "Submitted: 8 days ago, made popular 2 minutes ago" with less than 35 diggs when it hit the front page.

    Yah, Digg is totally user driven.. move along. Nothing to see here, folks.

    (although, this is a cool link.. )
  • grawity, on 10/17/2007, -11/+29HTML in e-mails sux0rz. And it sux even more in sigs.
    • DanielMartin, on 10/11/2007, -13/+3Welcome to 2007.
    • brasso, on 10/11/2007, -5/+12Welcome to the Internet DanielMartin! I’m pretty sure HTML in emails never ever has been good for anything else than exploiting Outlook and using images to verify if spam is read or not.
    • Spr0k3t, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2I like to reply to html encoded email messages with the < changed to < and > to > Sometimes I like to be a dick and change all the   to &psbn; I'd say 90% of the html based email I receive is spam... so it's extremely easy to filter.
      --
      This tagline is shareware, send $2.95 in a SASE to receive your key.file to read the original tagline.
  • uttles, on 10/17/2007, -13/+38I always thought anything but plain text in emails was pretty gay.
    • whitecamarors, on 10/11/2007, -7/+17Agreed. HTML signatures are stupid. Do nothing but bloat email traffic and look gay.
    • idonthack, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5IMO, email clients should support <b>, <i>, <u>, and <a>, and fixed-width font. Any more is superfluous and goes beyond what email is intended to provide.
    • diversionmary, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7Wait till you work in the corporate world.

      Not only do you get fancy be-fonted and img'd sigs, you get disclaimers.
    • tpink, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2"IMO, email clients should support , , , and , and fixed-width font. Any more is superfluous and goes beyond what email is intended to provide."

      That's what RTF is for (although I don't think RTF natively support hyperlinks, everything else it does).
    • phlogiston99, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3What's with the gay bashing?
  • ArchieAndrews, on 10/11/2007, -7/+34HTML sigs? Wtf, when did someone decide this was no longer a lousy idea? Did I miss a meeting?
  • kbull, on 10/17/2007, -8/+21Buried as lame... because if your email sig is anything but text you are annoying.
  • philz, on 10/11/2007, -8/+8Nooooooooooooo!
  • ManHammer, on 10/11/2007, -7/+10bad idea
  • Jugalator, on 10/17/2007, -8/+22***** HTML mails.
    • mikefitz2, on 10/11/2007, -12/+2Tables are alright, if not abused.
  • scanman20, on 10/17/2007, -16/+5Gmail still can't put a sig anywhere but at the very bottom of a message. How hard is that one to fix?
    • *jooloop*, on 10/17/2007, -5/+15Isn't that what a sig is? a signiture/message at the bottom of an e-mail?
    • wiihuck, on 10/17/2007, -5/+4"signature float" is one of the options with this extension. it puts your sig under what you *just* typed as a response, as opposed to the very bottom after all the replied text.
      • bryhhh, on 10/17/2007, -0/+1But if you are a good boy and bottom post like you supposed to, the sig will be at the bottom anyway.
    • wiihuck, on 10/17/2007, -3/+3why do i get dugg down for answering a question? the guy who replied first -- and has been dugg up -- obviously didn't understand the question, but i get the opposite treatment? this place is backwards.
    • Spr0k3t, on 10/17/2007, -2/+2@wiihuck

      Welcome to Digg... you'll see it everywhere. If someone believes your response is related to a bad idea, it'll get buried.
    • changyang1230, on 10/17/2007, -1/+2Digg wiihuck up, he's right.

      The signature being located at the bottom in a reply message has always been a nuisance to many people, and the "better gmail" extension has an option to move the signature to where it should be. Better gmail extension, by the way, is a great extension which combines some of the best gmail greasemonkey scripts in one place.

      Better Gmail extension:
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4866

      The standalone "signature float" greasemonkey script:
      http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3067
  • slapthemonkey, on 10/11/2007, -10/+5I have never used signature before , now will use. Very nice work, cheers!
  • Serra1, on 10/11/2007, -13/+3Yes, the extra 20 bytes of HTML will BLOAT your email and make it totally useless and people will hate you.
    • resplence, on 10/11/2007, -5/+9You got it.
    • Spr0k3t, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1That's the most accurate statement I've read on Digg all day.
  • Gold3n, on 10/11/2007, -1/+18Although I don't mind HTML signatures in private personal emails, I really hate it when people send these gigantic image laden signatures in the business world. When their weird formating makes their signature four times the size of the rest of the text, I just laugh.
  • brasso, on 10/17/2007, -4/+15I hate HTML in emails... It isn’t used for anything good anyway, most HTML emails I receive is someone who just discovered how to change the colour and font of the text so it can’t be read.
  • ngmcs8203, on 10/17/2007, -7/+4I think most of you are missing the point. It's not really about adding image signatures like message boards. The post is more about letting you know that it is possible to add a lil style to your standard text sigs. A splash of color never hurt anyone.
  • Otto, on 10/17/2007, -6/+17HTML in email? I can think of no better way to get ignored.

    What we really need is a GMail feature that will autorespond to people and say "Your email was rejected because it contained HTML. Try again, but this time, send it as plain text like the rest of the world."

    I would use that feature.
    • b3mus3d, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Yuhuh, wait 'till you get fired for missing a deadline due to a change in schedule you missed...

      I dunno, something like that.
  • folletto, on 10/17/2007, -5/+8Saying "html signatures are bad" is simply an exaggeration. Everything is bad is used badly. Even a sheet of paper. :P

    I'm using a clean "HTML" signature since a few months ago, whan I found this tutorial:
    http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2006/03/a_guide_to_css_1.html

    It uses a bit of CSS: a border, a font-size, a color, an align. With this in mind, I did a small and nice signature that looks well quite everywhere, and if the client is text-only it displays just text (since the style is CSS).
    • nonsecu, on 10/17/2007, -9/+6HTML of any kind in emails is bad.

      The end.
    • folletto, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8Nice story, bad ending. ;)

      The e-mail standard support a thing called mime-type. It's designed to allow you to have a single mail with both text and html. A well formatted e-mail is both text AND html.

      Html in an e-mail is a delicate thing, but could be done without harming anyone. Instead, it could increase the readability and effectiveness. A well designed signature, balanced WITH CSS to be unobtrusive, light and separated from the text flow, is better from any point of view.

      Also, if you notice text is often used VARY BADLY in e-mails, adding huge paragraph just to obtain a "nice signature", that will be better if made with just unobtrusive CSS.

      As said, the issue are the users, not the text-or-html e-mails. :)

      The same happens on the web. A bad designed page is bad regardless of the technology used (tables or css). So, usually is better a plain text page. But if the page is well designed, you are getting the most from CSS pages, so they are rendered correctly on any browser.

      If you wanna feel 'cool', 'hackish' or 'right' because everyone - also, here - says "text is the only right way", feel free to do it. Instead, you can turn on the brain and realize that there's no spoon... er... that the only answer is "it depends". ;)
  • rapier, on 10/17/2007, -5/+8Email has always been, and should always be, plain text. This is just another way to ***** off people and use more bandwidth.
  • mrgoat, on 10/17/2007, -6/+7Rich email sigs are for utter ***** *****.

    Fact.
  • dswinscoe, on 10/11/2007, -7/+4ah, fundamentalist zealotry by any other name ... so many sophists with so little imagination in one place; it's nauseating. Thankfully, the internet doesn't really care what any of your personal pet peeves or preferences might be - if you don't like HTML mail, ignore it. But please stop posturing with your absolutist *****. To know what you don't or can't know is wiser in a universe in continuous flux. Just try to enjoy the ride!
    • nonsecu, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6Dear New (1994 and later) and clueless Internet User,

      Please save your ridiculous, non-standard, broken and (at least in my MUA) unreadable signatures for your inter-office, windows-based email.

      There is no reason to confirm your cluelessness with an HTML based sig - it will be apparent from your content alone.

      I would tell you to go back to AOL, but I suspect even their demise pre-dates your active participation on the public Internet.
  • DaveV, on 10/17/2007, -5/+6Can someone explain to me why we need HTML, or even rich text in email?
    • jeriqo, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5Eye candy.

      Why would you need images and css on digg ? heh
    • folletto, on 10/17/2007, -4/+5Regarding *well* designed signatures and mails:

      Signatures:
      1. It is useful to add business related informations automatically.
      2. It is useful to separate the body from the signature.
      3. It is nice to see well designed signatures because they characterize the writer as the real signatures.

      Rich Mails:
      1. It is useful to send attachments (it's multipart mime type, the same thing that allows rich mails).
      2. It is useful to make semantic annotations (strong, emphasis, links).
      3. It is useful to separate different text types in the mails (I usually put the code snippets in Courier)

      In any case, it non-obtrusive and makes an email better to be read. :)

      Be careful: these are points if you use the 'richness' wisely. Exactly like on the web (well designed website vs bad designed website). :)
    • DaveV, on 10/17/2007, -3/+6@jerigo:
      "eye candy" is often useless or annoying.

      "Why would you need images and css on digg ?"
      Images, because they can. CSS is for formatting the page. Neither are needed in email, and can be counterproductive (see image spam).

      @folletto:

      I never asked about SIGNATURES. I asked about HTML and rich text.

      Signatures:
      1) this can be done by the email client and does not require HTML. It does not fall into anything I asked.
      2) This is what white space is for and it does not require HTML or rich text.
      3) Does not require HTML or even rich text.

      Rich Mails:
      1. MIME and attachments need neither rich text or HTML.
      2. I will concede that it may be nice to be able to do this, but it is completely unnecessary for anyone with adult communication skills.
      3. This has been done for years before rich text was used in email by means of indentation and line markers.

      "In any case, it non-obtrusive and makes an email better to be read. :)"

      Unless, of course, one is a text only email client, in which case it clutters the screen horribly.

      It is called Electronic Mail. It is a text communication method. One can use MIME to attach files just as one would enclose non-text items in a letter. There is no need for HTML and precious little use for rich text.
    • folletto, on 10/17/2007, -3/+1I'm sorry if I added something you weren't asking, lord. I'll try to not offend you anymore. ;)

      I could cite endless examples on WHY the message is beyond the 'plain text' (perception, neurology, cognition, aesthetic, usability, communication reasons), but from your answers is clear that you aren't here to understand, but just to push boldly your opinion on a public space. :)

      Have a nice day. :)
    • folletto, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2I'll add just a technical detail:
      "1. MIME and attachments need neither rich text or HTML. "

      To support attachments, html, richtext, utf-8, etc, ANY mail requires this command:
      Content-Type: multipart/alternative; [...]
      By RFC:
      http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc1341/7_2_Multipart.html

      This little thing splits a single e-mail message into multiple parts. Each part has a MIME type: it could be text/plain, text/html, or any other MIME type.

      So, if a mail supports MIME and multipart, it also supports HTML or any other standart type. Each content is in a different part of the e-mail and so it doesn't interfere if you prefer to see text/plain only.

      As stated before, a good designed signature is displayed as plain text in the default ascii part.

      In the end, anyone could do whatever he or she prefers, without silly religion wars. :)
  • sugarcrook, on 10/11/2007, -6/+0This is great, and timely. I was just trying to figure this out today.
  • arizonagroove, on 10/17/2007, -5/+8HTML in email is a concept that should have been strangled at birth. Then the people who conceived it should have had their AOL accounts closed to keep them away from the Internet.
  • jeriqo, on 10/17/2007, -10/+2All these "HTML emails sux0rz" kids are really annoying.

    Stay in 1970, and feel elite.
  • rgallagher, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html

    ..tbh
  • AxsDeny, on 10/17/2007, -6/+6If you can't convey what you want in plain text email, then you are a poor communicator.

    I haven't heard a good argument for why HTML (or RTF) is necessary at all in email. Colored text is uneccessary. If you need images in an email, add them as attachments, not inline decoration.

    • wiihuck, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3i use html for links. if i want to send a link of a book on amazon to my dad, i don't want the link taking up three lines in his email.
    • anonym41414, on 10/11/2007, -4/+3Are you the kind of person who suggests that in lieu of italics for emphasis people should use all caps or misplaced underscore characters or something?

      ASCII is a subset of typography, okay? There's absolutely no good reason why I shouldn't be able to italicize a word in an e-mail, have the mail program convert that to HTML for me on my end, and have the recipient's e-mail program display it as italics on the other end.

      Saying HTML in e-mail is bad because it's been misused it like saying we should get rid of the exclamation point because people don't know how to use it. Baby, bathwater, etc.
    • changyang1230, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Wrong reply. Digg needs a "delete" button.
    • grawity, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1wiihuck: tinyurl.com
  • gafasiesornivek, on 10/17/2007, -5/+6Rich text sigs are for the ***** clueless. So is using Gmail for anything important.
  • harlowsmonkeys, on 10/17/2007, -5/+3Those of us who argue for plain text email need to face reality. We lost that argument. HTML won.

    And that is good, because we were wrong.

    Think of it this way. Imagine an alternate universe where email had not been invented, but computers had. So, people would use computers to compose messages, but then they would print them and mail them, using the postal service. What would those messages look like? Would they limit themselves to 12 point Courier printed with black ink on white paper?

    No, they would not. They would use different fonts, and colors, and embed graphs, and inline pictures, and add attachments.

    Now, in this alternate universe, what happens when someone invents email? Would they limit it to plain text? Of course not--it would be meant to be an electronic replacment for postal mail, and so it would need to be at least as expressive--they would need to support different fonts and colors, and allow embedded images.

    Now come back to our universe. In our universe, email was invented before most computers were capable of handling more than plain text, so email *HAD* to be plain text. That was a technical limitation. Computers now do not have that limitation, and there is simply no good reason that email should stick with a design that was forced on it by past technical limits, rather than move toward the design that it would have had, had it been invented after those technical restrictions were lifted. (There's still room for debate as to whether HTML is the right format, or something else that allows rich content).
  • tjarrett, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Can get the same effect by using just greasemonkey and http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3067
  • studley181, on 10/11/2007, -4/+0Better gmail would be great if it Firefox 2 didn't crash every time i tried to delete an email on OSX
  • actionjackson, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3What's wrong with some of you? Spammers use HTML, as do people with no sense of elegant, unobtrusive web design. Given.

    Spammers also use images. Given.

    Therefore, anyone who uses HTML or images in email is an ignorant loser?!

    Well, I'll one up you 'tards. Spammers also use....wait for it.....EMAIL! Therefore, any one of you morons who uses email is a flaming idiot! Make sense? Of course not!!

    Just because you ignorantly eschew the merits of the time tested and proven benefits of graphic design does not make you any more 1337!
  • eugene2x, on 10/17/2007, -1/+4Hmm, HTML in email. Here's one word to sum it up:

    Disgusting.
  • stockjones, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Cliffs:

    Programmers, network admins, techie snobs: "html in email ugh"
    Regular Joe, business users, new generation programmers, everyone else: "This is neat".
    • bradmoreland, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Regular Joe, business users, new generation programmers, everyone else: "Look, a shiny object! Purty..."

      What you are failing to understand is that by using HTML in your email you are assuming your reader is going to have an HTML-enabled client or wishes to receive your HTML email. Most companies with a halfway-competent security policy will only allow plaintext emails to be received. The reality is that most HTML emails received are spam or security threats.
    • folletto, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1It's not a matter of roles, it's a matter of perception. I know many ol'skool programmers that are using small and simple CSS signatures, and I know many new gen kids that are forcing their client to text only to feel ol'skool.

      @Bradmoreland:

      Just a technical addendum:

      A "HTML-enabled client" is a "MIME-enabled client". So, if you're using e-mails as the RFC states (RFC1341, RFC1521, Sept 1993), your mails supports the multipart/alternative MIME type, the one allowing both HTML AND Attachments (images, zips, etc).

      So, yes, I'm assuming that my reader is using a client that supports basic MIME types (multipart/alternative, text/plain, text/html), because it's a standard finalized in 1993, since I'm sending a message with both test/plain and text/html parts in the message. :)
  • IronChef, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I may get flamed for this but I'm from the old school BBS days when email was read with SLMR, Wildcats OLX, and QWK email readers. And, yes I even used OS/2 back then too. I thought taglines were pretty cool back then. Random tagline generators were all the rage. Perhaps a come back for them would be in order.
  •  

    Login or register to add a comment

    Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.


© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain.
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.