Sometimes the same old email signature day in and day out just won’t cut it. If you’re a Gmail user looking for some ways to mix it up a bit, you’ve come to the right place. Here are five ways to spice up your Gmail signature.
These tips vary from the practical to the creative to the random. If you have other tricks for adding something unique to your sig, let us know in the comments.
1. Random Signature
Feeling lucky? Maybe you have an assortment of wise and pithy quotes to share with email recipients, or perhaps you want to rotate between a number of self-promotional links. Either way, there’s a Gmail Labs feature called Random Signature that has you covered.
If you’ve never explored Gmail Labs before, just head to the upper right of your Gmail interface and click the green chemistry beaker to access this experimental but typically fairly stable features section. Scroll down until you find the Random Signature line item and click the Enable radio button to turn it on.
Then, head over to the General tab in your Settings section (again, you’ll find the Settings link in the upper right of your Gmail interface). In the Signature section you’ll see a new option underneath the regular text area where you input your sig. Checking the box will automatically append a random item after your normal signature if you use one, otherwise it will use the random item as your sig.
By default, Random Signature will pull quotes from a BrainyQuote RSS feed, but you can replace this with a file of your own. If you’re comfortable in a text editor, an easy way to generate your own feed is to use the default RSS file as a template and edit it to taste for your own needs.
2. Wisestamp
Wisestamp is a Firefox extension we covered late last year that can enhance your email signature not just in Gmail but also in Hotmail, Yahoo! mail and AOL mail.
Simply install the add-on to gain the functionality of a rich text editor for composing your email signature. Change font styles and colors, add and resize images, and add a row of icons with links to your social networking services of choice.
You can also pull in items from an RSS feed right into your signature, making it a great way to promote your latest blog post, Flickr photos, status updates, random quote, or pretty much anything you can stick into an RSS file. For a walkthrough of the Wisestamp featureset, check out the tour video below.
3. Location in signature
Frequent travelers and virtual office workers in distributed teams will especially enjoy this one. Another Gmail Labs feature, Location in Signature does just what it says: appends your current location to your outgoing emails.
To turn it on, head to the green chem beaker Labs icon again and scroll down until you find the Location in Signature line item. Click the Enable radio button to turn it on. Then, head over to your Settings area’s General tab as we did with Random Signature above. Check the box next to “append your location to the signature.” If you also enabled Random Signature, the two can live harmoniously and aren’t mutually exclusive; just check both boxes if you like.
Once enabled, Location in Signature will use your IP address to make its best estimate of your geographic location. For improved accuracy, install Google Gears — its location module can use the nearest Wi-Fi access point to more closely pinpoint your actual location.
4. Black Canvas Gmail Signatures
Another Firefox extension, Black Canvas handles both HTML signatures and managing multiple sigs for different email addresses automatically. You can also set up to four different signatures for each address and switch between them as well.
One nice touch with Black Canvas is the live preview pane that shows what your sig will actually look like as you edit the HTML.
5. Signature Tweaks
This add-on is less about editing your actual sig and instead is about modifying where it is positioned by default. Normally when you use Gmail’s “Reply” feature, your signature gets appended at the very bottom of the email, after the quoted text you’re replying to. This isn’t always the desired behavior, and many folks would rather have their signatures be included after their reply text and before the quoted text.
That is precisely what Signature Tweaks does. Another Gmail Labs feature, you enable it by clicking the Gmail Labs beaker icon, scrolling down to the Signature Tweaks line item and clicking the Enable radio button.
Next, just reply to any message and your signature file will by default be included before the quoted text instead of after. Signature Tweaks also gets rid of the separating spacer dashes that typically appear before your signature as well.
Do you use any of these Gmail add-ons for your signature? Do you know of others? Let us know down below!
More productivity resources from Mashable:
- 5 Ways To Log Into Several Gmail Accounts At The Same Time
- 13 Gmail Extensions for Firefox 3
- HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Gmail Labs
- 20 Simple Productivity Tools for Bloggers
- 7 Productivity Tips, Plus Tools for Freelancers and Web Workers
Reviews: Firefox, Flickr, Gmail, Wisestamp
Tags: email, gmail, gmail labs, gmail tips, Lists, signatures
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