/ FIREFOX, GMAIL

GMail HTML signature

This time, I won’t ramble about some point of details that only a handful of specialists have thought about. This time, this article has the potential to touch ten thousand of normal people across the world (I only exaggerate a little of course). This time, I will blog about GMail signatures.

Ever wanted to have a nicely crafted signature in your emails? Outlook has the feature. I guess other fat softwares have the feature. Guess what? GMail doesn’t. If you don’t believe it (neither did I at first), just try to create a signature that displays something completely extravagant, like a mailto hyperlink for example. You will find out you can’t since the text area only accepts plain text. HTML you could type won’t be treated as such but encoded to plain text. Strangely enough, the mail itself accepts HTML so I really don’t understand the reason behind this limitation.

GMail signature

Anyway, the first solution is to have somewhere a file where you can type your nicely crafted signature and paste it into every mail. But software is my trade, and it didn’t feel too satisfying…​

Wistestamp logo

Since I couldn’t possibly be the first (or the only one) to have this problem, I went on the hunt on the Internet and found Wisestamp. First, let’s say it is available for Firefox and Chrome, so if you don’t use one of them, tough luck.

Wisestamp has the following features:

  • HTML signature creation
  • two settings to alternate between business and personal signatures
  • GMail integration: a button appears in your GMail inteface
  • other web-based mails are supported: Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL
  • widgets for social networks
  • inclusion of a hyperlink for the latest link of a RSS feed

Compared to most similar tools, Wisestamp doesn’t just paste the signature below your mail. If you choose another signature (or even if you update it), it really will replace the  previous signature. It won’t add the newer one below the old one.

I only got one complaint: I would like more than two signatures so I can, for example, use different languages for my business signature. Then, the product is free so I consider myself lucky!

I can’t resist the pleasure of showing you my own signature:

My own signature

PS: notice the Wisestamp integration.

If you have the same needs as me, I can only recommend the product.

Nicolas Fränkel

Nicolas Fränkel

Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Also double as a trainer and triples as a book author.

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GMail HTML signature
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