Are you annoyed that gmail only lets you setup a very dull email signature?
I personally think that flat format text signatures are long-winded and just fill emails with thousands of words of *cough* crap. I especially hate people who waste hundreds of bytes of storage with instructions “not to print this email because it will save a tree“, or that “anything they say is their own words and nothing to do with their company blah blah blah”. However, I have always liked a small business card type graphic at the tail of an email with a link to the author and/or their company.
A picture paints a thousand words and all that…
Gmail is the best free email service on the web – with over 7GB of storage, a super fast interface, really neat email search functions and integrated document editing it blows hotmail away – IMHO of course 😉
But my only niggle has been it’s apparently inability to allow rich HTML style email signatures. Whether you like email .sigs or not, this excellent little FireFox add-on (http://blankcanvasweb.com/pages/id_9/n_gmail_signatures/) quite simply transforms GMAILS signature functionality.
I’d tried unsuccessfully to get the GreaseMonkey srcripts working in the past so decided to try this one out of frustration. Boy am I glad I did…
Two minutes after installing the excellent Blank Canvas Gmail script I had setup my new improved email signature.
My old signature was:
—
Nick Litten
IT Consultant
followed by emails, telephone numbers, skype info, contact information, address, blah blah blah
but now, courtesy of this terrific little add-on it appears as:
Nick Litten
Infotech Nerd
projex | email | profile | skype | facebook | linkedin | twitter
I love my new sig and dont think it’s as obtrusive as some of the massive email signatures I receive on a daily basis containing names, address, telephone numbers, a long waffling legal blurb and even worse the dreaded ‘please think about the ecosystem before printing this message’
My new super-sig has the link to this website, a link to email me and two social networking links.
The graphic is dynamically imported from Face-book and is constantly updated in the background with my last four blog entries… but obviously you could link to any graphic you like, or bit of javascript or whatever.
How to install:
- OK – so this is an add for the Firefox Browser and I’m currently using Version 3.0.7 (the latest version as at March 2009)
- Download and install the Blank Canvas GMAIL Addon working perfectly at 1.11.12 you can check that it’s installed and running by clicking TOOLS | ADDONS in Firefox.
- Surf off to your gmail account – mail.google.com
- click on COMPOSE MAIL and you will notice there is now a little button saying EDIT SIGNATURE. You can paste your HTML code here and Voila! Google Mail has a smart signature.
I love tools like this – it ticks all the boxes of my application design coda; simple to install, works out of the box, clever code behind the scenes and great results!
Kudos to the Blank Canvas Crowd!