Alex Conner

Friendly HTML Email Signatures

I’m a big fan of HTML email, especially when it’s used right. However,
a lot of people are “doing it wrong.” While HTML gives you a ton of
control over how your email looks, what you should really do is try and
obey the wishes of the person who is reading your email. This results
in smaller email filesizes, which make them go “down the wire” faster,
use less wireless bandwidth and be more compatible.

So, what makes a good HTML message? Well, it’s cool to be able to make
stuff bold and itallic, put data in a table and inline images when it’s
helpful to include them. But, at the same time, there are things you
can do that make the email harder to process on the recieving end. For
example, inlining images means they are not attached and therefore will
be less intuitive if possible for the reciever to understand how to
download or save these images. Additionally, since the images are
embedded into the HTML, users with a small mailbox won’t be able to
detach the image.

Another thing that is undesirable is to use absolute font sizes. It’s a
bad idea in regular web development because it hurts the end user’s
ability to control how things are displayed. Instead, your fonts should
be set using relative sizes, (small, medium, large, em’s or
percentages). For example, my new email signature no longer breaks this
rule (it used to be 10px). Now, my signatures are .8em (ie, 80% of your
email client’s default font). So, if your client’s font size is set to
16pt, the signature is displayed much larger than the previous 10px at
12.8px.

Lastly, something to avoid is using a lot of HTML. Unless you’re
sending out a newsletter there isn’t a lot of reason to use a ton of
HTML. Just some minor formatting, stay away from setting font colors
because again, this goes away from the user’s preferences.

I do still set a font, though (Verdana) because gMail and a few other
clients most of my friends use likes to use Times for email if a font
isn’t set and I think that’s just a horrid font for email.