I agree, I don't think having a gif at the bottom of the email signatures is a great idea. However, with the way things are headding, I don't think this is a huge deal.
The way this is implemented will differ considerably between different clients. Which client is used? Depending on how your companies email system is setup, you may be able to setup some form of interception that puts the gif at the bottom.
Basically, what needs to happen is:
- Attach gif
- Make message HTML (This is not compulsory, but will make sure the thing display properly.)
- Include signature. This is not compulsory as a lot of clients these days will automatically display attachments at the bottom of the email.
Another way you might beable to to this is to make an email that looks the way you want, and send it too yourself. Use the client to put the entire source into a file. You might beable to use this to make a signature that tricks the receiver into thinking there is an attachment there. Might or might not work and there are bound to be many problems.
Outlook express (and I imagine Outlook as well) have a feature called "stationary". This is where you can specify background headder, signature etc to make a HTML email. You can create your own stationary and can set it to default. This would be an easy and effective way to go. Most common clients should be able to read the message and the users will see how it is going to look before the send the email.
I would imagine that competing clients such as Evolution etc will have a feature which does that same thing, although it may be under a different name.
Things to think about:
- Size of the email. Keep the gif small.
- I use KMail which by default does not display HTML messages because of the potential security risk. This is a growing trend. This means that users have to judge whether or not they trust the sender and if they do they need to take action to see the email (For me it's a single click).
- HTML is not readable by all clients. Some older/simpler/specialised clients such as pegasus mail for dos can not read HTML and this this is inconvient for the user.
- If it's in HTML, I generally tread it as spam/mailing list.
- Is it worth the overhead?
- HTML overrides the users settings. This is very annoying for someone like myself who needs special settings because of my eyes.
Summary. If you have the stationary feature or similar, that will be the easiest option. But beware, using HTML is likley to lead to the emails being falsley identified as spam, along with a whole heap of other problems. If you don't have this option, let me know and we can think of other options.
