@dvocable

There have been many Greasemonkey scripts and Firefox addons that do the job of adding pictures and links on Gmail signatures. As you know Gmail, on its own, doesn’t support the use of html and pictures in its email signatures in order to prevent misuses. So these scripts and addons have been the favorite lot of many who wanted to spice up their emails a bit. However since the new version of Gmail debuted, many of them have ceased to work.

But luckily here is one script called Gmail HTML Signatures that still works. It not only adds pictures and links on your signatures but also enable float. In other words, when you are replying to an email, your signature will be visible just below your message and not after the copy of the original email embedded in your reply. See screenshot of a signature below.

For newbies, please note that you first need to install the Greasemonkey addon on your Firefox browser and  then this script. After you have installed the script, when you open your compose editor, you will see that just after the ‘From:’ section, you will see a link called ‘Create Signature’ . When you open that link, you will see a window where you need to add the html code of whatever signature you have created.

If you don’t know how to create a html and want a quick solution, you can use a free online WYSIWYG editor like this one at Real Graphics. Create your signature, format it well, add the font colors and the picture. When you are through, click the toggle (< >) button and copy the html code from there.

Remember if you using pictures, be sure to fill the  description of the picture in the ‘Alternate Text’ in the upload window. Whatever you fill there will come out in the alt=”…” section of the html code. For example: alt=”StumbleUpon”.

This will ensure that the image description is shown whenever your email recipient can’t receive html emails. Just like in the screenshot above.

As a PR professional who needs to send out information to many people daily, I find myself in need of an email client through which I can send my emails to many people at one go and yet customise each mail – do the ‘Dear so and so’ in the body of the mail. Also on each of the email that goes out, the recipient’s email addresses alone should appear in ‘To:’ section without disclosing the other emails.

No, I’m not talking about spamming nor believe in that. But suppose you need to send out a news release to your contact journalists, send event invitations to a group of media friends, or send newsletters to subscribers on behalf of your client – such a tool is bound to come in handy. These are emails that the recipients anyway know that you are sending to other people also. So why waste two hours sending individual emails to everyone instead of just getting it done in one go. Of course I can ‘bcc’ to everyone but that looks rude to many people.

Forget about work, think about the time you need to send personal email invites to hundreds of people on a party that you are throwing, or on your wedding. Sometimes, all of us need some technology to simplify our lives, and if if is about reducing the number of email correspondence that we have to make, how nice it would be.

A lot of tools, called Email Mailing List Managers, that handles such tasks are available online. These come as independent desktop applications or as Outlook plugins. Desktop applications are like independent softwares that you need to run on your PC to send the multiple emails, while the Outlook plugins are small programs that you need to install so that you can mass mail from your normal Outlook client itself.

Choosing the right one is though not so easy. Most of those available are paid versions with some costing a bomb. Some are too complicated to handle. Some lack a few features that I wanted.

Some things I look for in my email campaign manager are:

1. Easy to use – I just want to type my message, select a mailing list and click ’send’. That’s it. No other complex stuff.
2. Customisation of each mail – Like I mention before, I want to greet each of my mail recipients with their names, and not send a ‘dear all’ mail.
3. Ability to import and export mailing list – If I have to create a mailing list consisting of hundreds of emails, imagine the pain if I have to type each and every email address in creating the list. Why not just import it?
4. Formatting options on the compose window just like I get in MS Word or Outlook – there are many cool mass email senders that I found but they lack the formatting option. Without that, my mails would just look plain simple text.
5. Templates – Are there some pretty templates available that I can use for my emails or newsletters? If yes, they would be such a delight.

After much experimentation, I decided on two tools – a free desktop application and a fee Outlook plugin.

Desktop application
The desktop application I use is SendBlaster. It has a free and pro edition that costs 75 euros. The free edition allows you to have two mailing lists and you can have 100 email addresses on each mailing list. However what I like about SandBlaster is that it a feature rich compose editor that allows you to format your emails – like the Bold, Italics, font family, font size buttons, etc. I found many other cool free mailing list managers but they lack this feature. SandBlaster even has an affiliate program that I am using :-)

Outlook plugin
This one is called the eAnnouncer. This comes completely free and allows you to send emails to unlimited number of email addresses at one go from your Outlook client.

Both Sendblaster and eAnnouncer have mail merger feature that allows you to customise each mail that you send.
Tags: India, PR, blogging, email, mailing list managers, public relations, social media