Mac Forum / General / General / March 2008

My advice is: don't. The instant you deviate from plain text content you
inherently reduce the number of people who can and will see your
message. You've also at a minimum doubled the bandwidth consumption for
both you and them in the process and the space the message takes on both
machines as long as it's retained.

Put yourself in others shoes.

Have you considered that everyone else in the world might not *want* to
see your spiffy HTML formatted emails with whatever font size and style
*you* think looks great?  Have you considered that other may not want to
have to download an image every time they receive an email from you?

You can bet if every message you sent *me* had a freaking image
attachment, I'd quickly grow tired of having to download your emails! I
might even just simply ignore you without telling you.

Plain text is the preferred method for emails by people who know the
internet. It is efficient, safe, virus-free, will be readable by any
mail client at the other end, doesn't impose your font, size, style
preferences on others, and has far smaller risk of being filtered out by
spam filters.

HTML messages are generally two to four times larger for the same
message than plain text equivalents. That means not only do they take
longer to transfer over the net, contributing to network congestion,
they also take up more disk space on your computer, on the recipient's
computer, and on every server they hit along the way!

With HTML messages, the people who receive the messages have little or
no control over the text font, size, and style. They must read the
message in whatever font, size, and style *you* set when you created the
message. Plain Text messages, on the other hand, display in whatever
font, size, and style the recipient wishes.

HTML email is dangerous because it may contain links to external sites
that will do malicious things.  For instance, a spammer can include a
link to an image, but this link contains a tag as data. The server at
the other end will get that request when your *read your email* and
based on the tag, will be able to confirm that you've read the email and
not only flag your email address as active/good, but also use your IP
with geographical location servers to assign a location code so that
they can then sell your email address to other spammers along with your
general location.  If everyone stopped sending HTML emails, everyone
would block it, and then spammers would be left with very few means to
escape spam filters because their messages would have to be simple and
without tricks.

<http://mailformat.dan.info/>

Just paste it where you would type a sig in the Signatures preference.  
You can even mix text and pictures there.

This is assuming that you're using mail.app and not a third-party mail
program.

The wisdom of having pictorial sigs is another matter.

Only a select few, including myself, may use JPG as a signature.

JPG
(Jeffrey Paul Goldberg)

Mail.app and presumably other mail programs will display a picture from
your address book that corresponds to the address of the sender of the
mail that you are viewing.

If your recipients are using a program that does what Mail.app does, then
just make sure they have the picture of you that you want in their address
book.

This way you are not sending a picture with each mail message.

Cheers,

JPG

I personally do not recommend routinely sending out your signature in
jpg format to anyone. There is too much abuse in this day and time, and
friends may not always remain friends, if you get my drift. That simple
sig file could be copy-pasted into a document and used to your discredit
at some point in time, should a friendship become dissolved. And just
how would you deny that said document that someone faxed somewhere was
not sent by you? Do you see my point? Some things are better kept to
yourself, IMHO.