It’s a far away and murky past where I didn’t use Google’s Gmail as my primary email provider. Before GMail (BG) I used Hotmail and Talk21 (now that really does show my age), neither of them regularly or with any realisation what a key role emails would play in later life.

Now, emails are the primary method of communication for just about every person in the UK.  Rather ridiculously, even around my office staff members would rather blast out an email to a colleague than walk around the corner to speak with them face-to-face.  Outlook runs on my work computer all day every day and I’m connected to my email accounts through my phone 24 hours a day.

With email now playing such a core role in so many people’s lives and with Google essentially holding the title of ‘biggest webmail provider worldwide‘ it surprises me that they still haven’t yet provided an option for HTML email signatures.  You wouldn’t dream of sending an an item of official post on non-letterhead paper, why should you have to make do with the one or two lines of unsightly black text that is the closest thing Google provides to a native signature?

This is a very well-documented imperfection in what is otherwise a remarkable on-line email system. There have been quite a few attempts at changing this using Firefox plugins and Greasemonkey scripts but none of them work consistently across different computers (which is the beauty of web-based email after all), and can render the service very buggy on less-modern machines.

One of the things I recently discovered about Gmail that I found really interesting is that if you copy a piece of HTML from a browser window and paste it into an open GMail message, it will appear within your email exactly as you copied it: font styling, link colours, images and all.  Even better, it will retain this styling for whoever you send your email to as long as they have HTML emails enabled – even in Outlook 2007!

This trick, combined with the Canned Responses Google Labs add-on (by Chad P), means that you can paste pieces of custom HTML into GMail and save them as a re-insertable ‘canned response’ and insert them with ease into any email you write.

To enable Canned Responses navigate to Settings » Labs whilst signed into Google Mail and you will be presented with all manner of add-on goodness. Perhaps the best things about these add-ons is that they install directly into your GMail account rather than into your browser or computer so you have access wherever you log in from.

With Canned Responses enabled all you need to do is:

  • fire up your favourite HTML editor,
  • put together your signature,
  • preview it in your browser of choice,
  • copy the results into an open GMail compose email and,
  • save it as a new Canned Response:

cannedresponse2

Now whenever you write a new email you can select your saved signature from the drop-down list and viola: instant, easy and simple HTML signatures!

cannedresponse3

Of course, it still doesn’t append the signature automatically, you still have to manually add it from the Canned Response list.

The only downfall is that a Canned Response won’t reliable save HTML images (even if they are self-hosted).  Weirdly, however, it will save your signature, images fully intact, if you combine what I’ve outlined above with inserting images using my second-favourite GMail Labsl Plugin: Inserting Images by  Kent T.

Want to see the final results first-hand?  Send me a message and I’ll show you what it looks like.

It’s worth mentioning that you can also use Canned Responses in your email filter options, so I find it very useful as an auto-responder as well.