Finally: Gmail Introduces Rich Text Signatures | Hacker News Reader

Finally: Gmail Introduces Rich Text Signatures

mashable.com

38 pointsdavidedicillo47 comments

"Finally?"

"Finally," Gmail introduces rich text signatures?

Not, "Finally, America Gets Out of Debt" or, "Finally, a Global Inter-Cultural Renaissance" or hell, even "Finally, a Fast T-Mobile Android Phone With an Effing Slide-Out Keyboard," but, "Finally... Gmail Introduces Rich Text Signatures?" This is what we were waiting for, with bated breath and Cheetoh-dust-encrusted fingertips?

I'm not angry, internet. I'm just disappointed.

The MyTouch Slide has the same 600MHz MSM7227 as the Droid, and has 512MB RAM, which is as much as the Nexus One. It blows away the G1 and regular MyTouch.

Finally only means that someone has been waiting for the mentioned stuff for a long time. It doesn't imply that it was the most important thing for the person.

You're absolutely correct; I just couldn't resist anyway.

Finally! We can now all use colors! And perky styles! And images!

Excellent! I am seriously considering just dropping all HTML email. Want your email to be received and read? Use the god damn plain text. You now, just write the email.

Yeah, great idea. Formatting never adds information to plain text.

I wouldn't say _never_. But pretty close.

Hey, you expressed emphasis in plain text without using formatting!

No, just markup. Much easier to parse...

Some people can use it for good. Many other people just add headache, not useful emphasis.

I think the better curmudgeonly solution, then, is not to read email from people who use HTML without restraint, rather than not to read email from people who use HTML.

I've found being the asshole tech guy who pulls crap like that is a losing strategy.

Perhaps I'm just not good enough at being the asshole tech guy who pulls crap like this though.

I'm not suggesting either; I'm just proposing a less "asshole tech guy" solution than what the original commenter said: "I am seriously considering just dropping all HTML email."

Formatting helps the least, those who use it most.

If you write well, removing the formatting won't delete information.

I did this about a year ago and have not regretted it. I've also discovered which newsletters I don't need to be getting anymore (not that I've ever subscribed to many)--i.e., the ones that don't send plaintext versions.

In this vein, I wish Gmail would let me select the display font for editing and reading plain text emails. For a while, a Labs feature allowed one to "view in fixed width" a plain text email, but they discontinued even that.

To all those who rail against HTML emails ...

Yes, I agree that almost all email can and should be plain text. And yes, I agree that most people who use colors and fonts and formatting should be prevented from doing so, because so many of them do it in a way that detracts from clarity.

However, some of us deal with real people as opposed to those who are interesting in and competent at technology. I often deal with people who can't fill in web forms because they can't click in a box to give it focus. I deal with people who can't email me if I use an anti-spammed email address such as my_name(at)domain(dot)com. I deal with people who can't find the underscore ("_") and don't know the difference between square and round brackets. I deal with people who sometimes put a space after a period, and sometimes don't.

I deal with normal people for whom computers are a mysterious tool that does inexplicable things unless they stick to the very few things they've been shown.

Trust me - they don't know how to tell their email client not to use HTML.

And "normal" people want colors, and fonts, and formatting, and bullets. They won't use plain text, even if they could.

ADDED IN EDIT: I've noticed that this comment has had a down-vote, but no reply. That's a shame. I'd really like to hear a considered and well-argued counter. Please, if was you who down-voted this, or if you simply disagree with it, let us know your thoughts. Thanks.

Normal people may want to things, but I don't want them nor do I want to see it in the emails I get.

They will use plain text if it's the only option they have.

Rage, rage against HTML emails like it's 1999.

But since GMail already supports rich text emails, this seems like a pretty obvious feature to add.

Besides the rich text editing capability is the option to have a different signature for every email address associated with your account.

This will further increase the usability of Gmail for me, especially in combination with the recently added feature that allows to send emails with a different email address directly from Gmail.

Recently? I've used that feature for years, and just recently disabled it because of the mess it inevitably causes when you reply from pr@nsa.gov to a message sent to blanchesun@esp-squad.org - or, in this case, when someone replies to a portion of your message conspicuously missing from sent-mail.

There was always the possibility to add other addresses but when sending emails with those as a sender it displayed something like "sent on behalf of xx@gmail.com". With a recent addition it has become possible to use your email providers SMTP server [1] so you can avoid this.

You can also set that you always answer from the address the email was sent to.

[1] http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=m...

Now if I could only configure it to bottom-post by default I'd be happy.

What I'd really like is for a mail client to find a way to make inline responses simple and intuitive, to the point that your average user would think to do it.

Am I the only one that doesn't like inline responses? Most of the time they feel awkward to me. I do use them when responding email from a couple of co-workers that are inlining fans; and when I need to add a point-by-point reply to some technical email.

The rest of the time, however, I top-post proudly. Feels like the closest thing to writing a reply letter.

Isn't that more of just a preference thing? I mean, I suppose Gmail/your mail client of choice could simply show the quoted previous email in the reply email box without any added spaces before, but I think most people would just hit enter a few times before typing (or go to the bottom as they prefer).

E-mails are plain text. "Rich text" has no business there.

I just wish that clients pike Gmail would drop the stupid truncation at 78 chars for plaintext emails.

From RFC5322, Internet Message Format: "Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF."

Feature suggestions for Gmail for increasing speed and ease of email:

1. Send subject-less email only. 2. Send plain-text email only.

Subject-less?

Yes, as in no subject line. Think: PostIt/SMS/Twitter.

Luddite.

Actually this a problem with most mail clients. They are terribly slow, even web based ones, for people who have multiple accounts, have a high email volume, and have to archive all their mail and have it easily accessible. Essentially the problem is most email clients suck, many terminal apps have been optimized for speed and thus many people with a ton of email use them, the culmination of all my mailboxes is about 22Gb of email! Outlook sucks at handling mailboxes over 5Gb same with most other clients, Gmail is ok at it but searching is a bit slow, and organization and control isn't that great. Gmail is also slow in usability compared to most clients like mutt or sup.

Not only that but HTML emails INCREASE mailbox size dramatically! Especially HTML signatures, because they generally use several different sizes/faces of font, contain images and may introduce "email backgrounds". In many cases the HTML markup of an email may be LARGER than the content of the email.

There's a difference between resisting progress and promoting simplicity.

Simplicity for whom?

I agree that on high traffic lists email should be kept to plain text, but for your daily business/social use it's far simple to format an email with html or rich text than it is to rely on ascii decorations for text markup, footnotes or any kind of table/diagram.

I used to be one of those who argued email should be plain text. I gave up because it was clear we lost. After I thought about it a while I realized we lost because we were wrong.

Imagine an alternate reality, very similar to our current reality. It has computers and computer networks, but for some reason, it never occurred to anyone to invent email. Networks are used for file transfers and web browsing and stuff like that.

Finally, someone gets the idea for email. Are they going to make it plain text? Of course not. They are going to want email to be an online alternative to regular postal mail, and so are going to try to match the features of postal mail.

Postal mail is often generated by composing in a word processor, printing the result, and mailing it. It is not limited to plain text. It can have bold and italic and colors and different typefaces and sizes. It can have embedded photos and graphics. It can have attachments (other printed itms, or a CD can be dropped in the envelope).

Email is going to have to support all that to be a viable alternative to postal mail. And thus email in this alternate reality would very likely start off as HTML email (or perhaps as .doc email).

Now back to our reality. In our reality, email was invented early in the computer age, when the technology simply didn't exist to match the graphical and formatting capabilities of postal mail. Hence, it was plain text--as that is all the technology could reasonably handle.

Well, we've got better technology now. Saying we should stick with the limitations that were imposed by 40+ year old technology is about as dumb as saying that we should limit thumb drives to 80 kilobytes because that was the capacity of floppies 40+ years ago.

How about they add some useful features, like support for sending time-delayed emails? I've been waiting for that for years, and have instead been doing it using a desktop client.

At long last!

I will be able to close all my Gmails with my (handwritten) signature and a corporate logo!

(I've worked for people who do this.)

Disappointed this doesn't seem to work for Google Apps (yet), as my work account is where I'd benefit most from including working links in the signature.

The earlier story said it was only live in the desktop client for now. Mobile and web users have to wait.

I don't see this feature yet, is it perhaps enabled for a select number of accounts?

Prepare for the Papyrus-storm.

alt.fan.warlord would be very upset.

(Oh my, Usenet references. I surely date myself.)

Yay Google, can you hear me clapping all the way back in the nineties ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com