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How to add an email signature in Gmail

Gmail keeps signatures in the General tab of its full settings screen, not in the quick settings panel that opens when you click the gear. Set it once in a browser on a computer. The steps below take about a minute, and the one people miss is the last one.

Do not have a signature yet?

Make one first. The generator is free, needs no account, and gives you something to paste before you open your settings.

Open the free email signature generator

Add the signature

  1. Copy your signature from the generator with the Copy signature button.Copy signature puts the formatted version on your clipboard, which is the one you want. Copy HTML is for pasting into a system that asks for source code.
  2. Open Gmail in a browser.
  3. At the top right, click Settings, then See all settings.Settings opens a narrow panel. See all settings, at the top of that panel, opens the full screen where the signature editor lives.
  4. Stay on the General tab and scroll down to the Signature section.General is the first tab and the section is a long way down, past the language, page-size and undo-send settings.
  5. If you have no signature yet, create one and give it a name. If you already have one, click it to edit it.The name is only ever shown to you in this settings screen. It does not appear in your email.
  6. Click into the box and paste the signature.Paste as you normally would. Gmail keeps the formatting, the layout and the images.
  7. Under the box, choose which signature Gmail should use for new emails and which for replies and forwards.Set both to your new signature unless you deliberately want a shorter one on replies. Leaving them unset means the signature exists but never gets inserted, which reads exactly like it did not save.
  8. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.This is the step people miss. Nothing on this screen saves on its own, and navigating away discards everything you just did.

Things worth knowing

One signature per sending address

If you use the Send mail as feature to send from more than one address, each address gets its own signature. Use the drop-down above the signature box to pick the address before you paste.

There is a 10,000 character limit, and images count

Google caps a Gmail signature at 10,000 characters and counts the image against that limit. If Gmail refuses to save, the usual cause is a large image; resize it and try again.

Plain text mode blocks formatting

If you cannot format the signature and the words Plain Text appear above the signature box, turn plain text mode off before editing. In plain text mode Gmail strips the layout and you get an unstyled block.

Images have to stay publicly reachable

Every recipient of every email fetches your logo and photo from the address they live at. A Google Drive image has to be shared publicly to work, and deleting the file stops the image appearing in signatures that already went out.

Inserting it by hand

If you set the defaults to none, you can still add the signature to a single message: at the bottom of the compose window, click Insert signature and pick it.

The Gmail apps are set separately

The Gmail apps for Android and iPhone keep their own signature setting and Google documents them on their own pages. Set this one on a computer first.

Using a different email client?

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