Google has added an experimental feature to Gmail that automatically lets the recipient of your e-mails know where you penned your missive.
Gmail Labs announced in a blog posting Tuesday that Gmail users can now append their e-mail signature to include their current city and country location. If you are overly officious, or travel frequently and enjoy "place dropping" to your friends and colleagues that you are in Dubai, Dublin, or, um, Duluth, this feature will appeal to you.
New Gmail feature lets the recipients of your e-mails know where you were when you wrote to them.
(Credit: Google.com)However, Google software engineer Marco Bonechi acknowledges that because the feature keys in on your IP address, it may not accurately report your location. (To illustrate that point, I should admit that I posted this blog--and captured the Gmail screenshot--from Oakland, Calif., while on a virtual private network attached to CNET's headquarters in San Francisco.)
As a result, Bonechi suggests that users' browsers have a version of Google Gears that supports the location module, allowing Wi-Fi access point signals to pinpoint your location.
To activate the feature, turn on "Location in Signature" from the Labs tab under Settings, then go to your signature preferences and check the box next to "Append your location to the signature."
If you've got several Gmail accounts and are frequently having to juggle signatures for each of them, worth downloading is Blank Canvas' Gmail Signatures. This experimental Firefox extension will drop in one of four custom HTML signatures based on whichever account you're sending the message from. If you're like me and have two or more accounts, setting this up is a big time saver.
Once installed, you get a new drop-down menu that lets you select one of your four custom signatures. These can be managed directly within Gmail, and come with an editor that shows you a live preview of whatever HTML you drop in. Included are four presets with nicknames like personal, business, and family, all of which can be renamed to suit the type of signature you've set up.
It's worth noting you cannot get at your custom signatures on browsers without the extension installed (even if it's the same machine), and this will not change existing Gmail signature settings. This means that any Gmail-specific signature you have will still show up, however, they'll appear underneath the one from the extension.
Gmail Signatures is an experimental add-on, and as such you must be registered with Mozilla's Firefox add-ons site to download it.
Pick out custom HTML signatures for Gmail, and get them to change based on what e-mail address you're sending them from.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Last week FoxyTunes rolled out a cool new feature called Signatunes that lets users add whatever music they're listening to as their e-mail signature. Users with the latest version of Foxytunes get access to a button that integrates into supported e-mail and blogging services. Clicking it inserts a small link that lists artist and song information. This link goes straight to the song's FoxyTunes Planet page--a helpful service that aggregates artist information from various music reference sources on the net, and in many cases includes a preview, or free streamed version of the track.
I had a go with it earlier today and came away impressed. Like the rest of the Foxytunes extension, Signatunes is highly configurable. You can pick out how you want the song information displayed, along with customizing the signature to say anything you'd like.
Signatunes is currently supported on nine platforms, including major Web e-mail providers like Gmail, AOL Mail, and Yahoo Mail, as well as blogging platforms like WordPress and MySpace Blogs.
If you've got the latest version of Foxytunes installed, you'll get a new button that lets you add a custom signature with music you're currently listening to.
(Credit: blog.foxytunes.com)- prev
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