MySigMail – UI Email Signature Generator | Hacker News Reader

MySigMail – UI Email Signature Generator

github.com

36 pointsantonreshetov21 comments

This isn't a criticism, just a note to others.

I'd caution others against using the embedded image functionality even if it seems cleaner/more reliable. It bloats out the size of the email you're sending too much. For example I added a 5 KB JPG image, populated all the default fields, and the resulting HTML was 70 KB. This seems to be the result of BASE64's inefficiency.

You could alternatively upload the image to e.g. Amazon's S3 and link to it instead. That way you have completely control, and there's some redundancy there.

According to my back of napkin maths, Amazon's S3 would cost less than 5c/month, assuming millions of requests, and the same 5 KB thumbnail.

I really like this open source project in general. Again, this is in no way a criticism of them, there's no other way I know of to embed an image.

Agreed. A single 5KB email isn't bad, it's when that email turns into a back-and-forth chain of emails with your signature attached to each reply.

> According to my back of napkin maths, Amazon's S3 would cost less than 5c/month, assuming millions of requests

You might need a bigger napkin.

For 1 million requests, S3 will cost you $0.40, excluding storage or other transfer costs. 5 million would be $2.

It's not free, but also '5c/month for millions of requests' is a tad bit off.

GMail also caches images these days.

May I ask how you got that figure? Using Amazon's S3 calculator here, I am getting sub 10c:

https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

This is assuming a 5 KB image, no free tier, US East, S3 Standard, and at least 1m requests (GET/SELECT). I'm including data out and data transfer.

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

GET, SELECT and all other Requests $0.0004 per 1,000 requests

1000 * 1000 is $0.40 for the requests.

On the calculator link you sent, I put in "1000000" in the GET/SELECT requests, and see "Estimate of your Monthly Bill ($ 0.39)"

Looks like I was mistaken. Thanks for the correction.

no worries - 40c is still not 'much' by most standards.

If you link to an image from an email (with an <img> tag) then:

* It looks like you're tracking which recipients read your email and when. Spammers do this a lot (or rather they used to) with single-pixel images called "tracking beacons". You send an email to millions of people, give each one a slightly different <img> link, look at the server log to see which images got downloaded, and those are your suckers.

* Because of the previous point, most email clients don't load images from external sources by default. They pop up a little notification bar saying something scary like "Click here to load unsafe images", because "Click here to load external images that might cause spammers to see whether you've looked at the email" is too complex. So your emails all now come with a scary warning, and most people won't see your image anyway.

Whatever happened to the simple line of text for a sig?

My Name * Developer * Excellent Company * me@example.com * +1.212.555.1212

Nothing happened to it. If you like your one liner, keep using it. You don't have to use this tool.

I was wondering if it was possible to sign emails on the mail server instead of configuring each client individually. Also annoying is the fact that some clients seem to alter the signature before sending the message, resulting in the utter destruction of my magnificent design. I have seen some tools like alterMIME but nothing specifically designed to insert signatures to the right place. Ideally some kind of milter for Postfix I guess.

This is cool, but I think you need to add some clarity around the "project" tab. I thought I was adding some sort of link/info for a project that I've worked on that would be relevant in a signature. I deleted the default one and the entire signature was deleted. I think "Projects" is a really bad name for this.

Agreed. I had the same experience. I think just calling it "Signatures" would be better.

Thanks for the suggestion! It is worth thinking about changing the name of tab Projects for better UX

This is really great! I've wanted something that builds a simple, beautiful signature like this for some time! Thanks!

Enjoy )

Copy as HTML is not working in Firefox

Firefox has its own opinion on this matter. We'll have to think about a solution.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

This is awesome, very well done!

Thanks!

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