I have gmail. I would like to be able to sign my emails with my signature. I know it’s possible, but not sure how.
Anyone like to help me with a step by step guide?
ETA- And why does Google, who is so intuitive and user friendly, not have this feature?
Scan you signature.
USe any ol’ photo editor to cut out (or ‘trim’) the signature part and save it as a .jpg image. You might have to cut/copy it, choose ‘new’ file and then paste it into it’s own file and save it.
When writing e-mails, ‘insert’ your jpg singature into the e-mail body like you are inserting any old file/image.
Then be prepared to have a huge number of people you e-mail not be able to see it “inline” and look anything at all like you intended.
I don’t have gmail myself, but the way I’ve seen it done is to embed an image of your signature at the bottom of your email. There are two routes you can go.
One
If gmail allows embedded images within the body of an email, you’re golden.
The problem here is that many other email programs will either completely strip out the image, or will not display it in its place but rather as an attachment. It also will increase the filesize of every email you send.
Two
Does gmail support HTML-formatted emails? If so, follow steps 1-3 above.
4) Place the image in a Web-accessible location
5) Use the absolute path to the image’s location as part of your HTML email. For example, <img src=“http://www.yourdomain.com/images/yoursig.gif”>
Ok, I know the scan part, and turn it into a jpg part. I’ve gotten that far. But it either comes up all goofy, or they can’t read it.
Beadalin, sorry for my ignorance, but what do you mean by the #2 part?
(And you think the AI of Google would notice this thread by now, and rectify the oversight. Just sayin’)
In these days of identity theft, do you really want your signature flying around the Internet, unprotected and available to anyone who intercepts it?
I think identity theft can be avoided here by the OP using a first name only.
dahfisheroo, if don’t have experience setting up HTML emails, try out the first scenario and see if it works for you. My second scenario would probably be too much of a pain to bother with.
Good luck!
I am curious. How does a signature do much to combat identity theft? Nobody in my experience checks the signatures for any transaction.
You only need one. And sometimes people do check.
Not concerned about identity theft, it’s pretty much a scribble-and I’d probably only use my first name anyways.
A friend of mine somehow did it, perhaps by using outlook express and inserting it to email? Or emailing himself, perhaps? It took several attempts to get it positioned correctly in the email, and not stretched out.
I am sure gmail does HTML, sometimes it’ll ask me to view emails that way if it takes to long to load.
Beadalin are you saying I should upload the scan to like a photo sharing sight, then use the link?
(Yes, I am a Luddite, why do you ask?)
Are you sure he didn’t just create a sig file using a different font? That’s what I do, kinda sorta looks like a signature but it’s really just Mistral or some fancy-cursive-looking font.
Like This
Nah, it’s his sig.
To add insult to injury, I complained about gmail not being able to do this, and my trying periodically for about a year or two, and it took him all of about 15 minutes to figure it out. Smug bastard wouldn’t tell me how he did it either.
(I guess I should expect a slew of emails with sigs from the 'dope now, too, mocking me… Thanks in advance.)
You can do it by dragging and dropping an image from another browser window into the Gmail compose field, but you’ll have to do it manually every time. I don’t know how to make it automatically become your signature (HTML doesn’t seem to work in the actual “signature” settings field). But even if you do this, your Gmail recipients will have to first click on a special “Show images in this email” link before your signature will show up (users of other email services should be able to see them).
As for WHY it’s so difficult, I dunno for sure because I can’t read the minds of Gmail’s programmers, but I can offer a guess (only a guess!): It might be related to the history of email.
HTML-enabled (or “rich formatted”) emails were originally meant to let people change fonts, add pictures, etc. to emails the way you would with a document – which is exactly how you want to use it right now – but unfortunately, in the late 90s, spammers and viruses came on the scene. They started exploiting security flaws in mail programs and subverting spam filters using HTML and deceptive images that could evade text filters.
During that same period, broadband wasn’t overly popular yet and many people were still on dialup. Newbies of the day (who probably didn’t know any better) would take large, uncompressed photographs and throw them into their emails, resulting in hideously long download times for the unlucky recipients. Sometimes, these messages could even overfill the recipients’ mailboxes (which were often space-limited POP3 accounts).
So as time went by, inline images gradually became “bad form” and people would not use them as much. Nowadays, the old problems aren’t as relevant, but maybe Google wanted to stay oldschool and safe? Dunno.
There is no good way to do it, just various bad ways that are not guaranteed to work. Plus, of course, there is no reason to do it. It’s simply pointless and difficult.
Well, I am a woman, isn’t that my purpose in life, to make things pointless and difficult?
Thanks for the help.
