13 March, 2008

Gmail inline messages

GMail has a wonderful rich text editor to compose emails but there are
some desirable things that you cannot accomplish in GMail using
standard techniques. For example:

1. GMail allows plain text signatures but there's no way to embed HTML signatures with images like the ones you see in Yahoo, Hotmail or Microsoft Outlook email.

2.
Gmail Rich text editor has standard text formatting features like font
sizes, colors, bullets, hyperlinks, indentation, etc. but there's no
way to add other HTML tags like TABLE, DIV, EMBED, etc. So how do
you embed Youtube videos, sophisticated table layouts, Flash animation
movies, inline podcast players like odeo, etc. in GMail
?

3.
You can compose new email in either Plain text or Rich text but how to
do you compose a new GMail message in native HTML something like a
webpage created in Microsoft Frontpage ?

4. Gmail lets you attach pictures to outgoing email but it shows up as an attachment on the recipients' screen. How do make embed a photograph that appears inline with the actual email message ?

5. You want to embed
the Feedburner Headline Animator graphic or the Feedburner Subscriber
Counter to your GMail signature which is an animated GIF file
.

Now the really good news is that you can do all the above easily with GMail and here's how to do it:

To embed an HTML signature with Images in GMail ?

Create
an HTML signature snippet using notepad or WYSIWYG editors like
Dreamweaver/Frontpage/Golive or online with
Geocities/GooglePages/Tripod Lycos. Your signature can have all kind of
HTML tags (including DIV, EMBED, TABLE) but all linked Image files,
audio files and video clips must be pointing somewhere the web and not
on your desktop.

Once you are satisfied with the layout, select
the entire portion of the webpage that you want to appear in the GMail
signature and drag it to the GMail compose window. Alternatively you
can copy it to the clipboard and then press Ctrl+V in the Gmail window.

Step 1: The HTML signature is created in Google Page Creator. Select the entire signature and press ctrl+c.

Step 2: Open a new Gmail compose message window. Now either drag the
signature in this GMail window or press Ctrl+V to paste it.

The same technique can be applied to embed anything in your gmail
message. Say you want to embed an image between two sentences, just
drag the image to your gmail compose window and drop it there. It's
that simple but makes you email more appealing as if it's composed
inside Microsoft Word or Outlook.

To embed Feedburner RSS feed
animator, open that graphic in your browser window and drag-n-drop it
anywhere in your gmail message.

You can even point images to
your blog or embed HTML forms so that recipients can subscribe to your
blog directly from your gmail message. Or create tables in Microsoft
word and place them in your email. Or even send entire webpages as
email so readers can view the page in the message itself without having
to click the link. The possibilities are endless.

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