Using 3rd-Party Hosted Images For Your Email Signature (Video)

Note: The video in this presentation is almost 20 minutes long.

I wrote a public article a small while ago on how to create email signatures using Windows Live Mail with locally hosted (as in on your hard drive) images. Most people were able to get that to work, but there were some that couldn’t because the process is admittedly a bit on the wonky side. In the commentary I had to assist a few with Microsoft’s weird way of getting that to work.

The 3rd-party way on the other hand always works. This is when your images are not hosted on your hard drive but rather out on the internet. It is much more “friendly” overall both in setup and when people are reading your messages because you’re not attaching small images files for every email you send out.

In the video, the following sites and tools are mentioned:

• Google Image Search – Used because you can easily specify the size of the images you want to find in exacting pixel measurements.
• Nvu – A free no-nag/no-spyware/no-malware HTML editor.
• ImageShack – A free online image hosting service

Some additional notes the video doesn’t cover

This is the list of “safe fonts” you can use via the Compose tab mentioned in the beginning of the video

Everybody who uses Win XP, Win Vista or Win 7 has these fonts installed and are therefore “safe” to use:

• Arial
• Courier New
• Franklin Gothic Medium
• Georgia
• Impact
• Lucida Console
• Lucida Sans Unicode
• Palatino Linotype
• Tahoma
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana

Small side note: NEVER USE COMIC SANS. EVER. That font is evil and will make you look stupid. See this video for an explanation why. If you use it, people will peg you as an idiot. Steer clear of Comic Sans.

You can use any image hosting service you want.

I use ImageShack in the presentation because it’s the easiest of the lot, but you don’t have to. You could use TinyPic, PhotoBucket, or any other number of free image hoster web sites.

Also bear in mind you could use your own web site. This is what I personally do for my own email signature. If you know how to push images via FTP to your server and can get the locations to input into Nvu later, this will work without issue.

If you use a free image hosting service, backup your images for just-in-case reasons.

It may occur that the images you push to a free image hosting service will stop working at one point. This sometimes happens. It’s not a problem because you can simply re-upload them again either to the same service or a different one, then go back into Nvu, modify your signature HTML file and that’s that.

Whenever you edit your signature with Nvu, it will be “live” the moment you save it for all future emails you send.

Once you’ve gone through the “hard part” of configuring Windows Live Mail to use a specific HTML file for your signature (such as the “my signature.html” as outlined in the video,) whenever you edit and save that file with Nvu it is immediately “live” when you compose any new email from that point; you will not have to go back into WL Mail and “reattach it,” so to speak. The only time you would ever have to reattach the HTML file is if you specifically deleted the signature out of WL Mail for whatever reason.