pasting an HTML email signature...seems broken

[Norsak]

Hi,

I setup mobiles for my company.
One of the things I need to do is put the official company email signature on devices before I give them to users.

This proved an unexpected challenge on the Android devices. (We use iphone 6s/7 & S7 Edge running Nougat)

We have an intranet webpage which generates the signature for each user.
The idea is that this allows for cut&paste of the signatures with consistent formatting, rather than manual entry.

The iphone experience:
I select the signature from the webpage (pictures and all) and paste it into the mail app's signature field.
Job done; the signature works, pictures and all.

The Android experience:
If I copy the HTML signature from the browser, and try to paste it into the default mail-app, I get : Maximum number of characters reached error.

...ok so maybe the disclaimer is too long.
NO, it just doesn't work. Somewhere around ~50 plain characters copied from a webbrowser, I get the Maximum number of characters reached error.

My Work around?
My signature-making website also gives me a text-only version (created because of Android).
I copy this from the webbrowser into the memo-app.
Then I copy it from the memo-app to the email-app .....now I can get more than ~50 characters into the signature.

But that only works with plain text, formatting and pictures get screwed up by the memo-app.


So. Is there a better way? If so: What would you propose?

 

[lunatic59]

and try to paste it into the default mail-app

I think this is your problem right here. From my experience, default mail apps on Android phones are very limited and not high priorities on the feature sets. My suggestion is to use a different mail client. There are several that work well, some free and others for a small fee. K-9 and MailDroid. You can also use gmail. The gmail client now can add other mail accounts like Exchange, Yahoo, etc. And, I just tested it and the html signatures work, but the gotcha is that any images can't be local to the device. They must be on a publicly accessible server for them to display properly.

 

[Norsak]

default mail apps on Android phones are very limited and not high priorities on the feature sets

Probably true, but that's just depressing, and not really something which I would consider acceptable / defensible in 2017.
Whom would I email my pitchfork to, to express my displeasure?

 

[lunatic59]

Since you're using S7's I'd say that's a Samsung issue. Just so you know, since Marshmallow (Android 6.0) there are no "email" apps on Google phones ... Nexus/Pixel users are expected to use the gmail app for all their mail needs ... or install a third party app. It's actually quite a nice solution and pretty similar to the iPhone mail paradigm.

What happened was when Android moved to this model, users were confused or angry that they'd taken away email, which, of course they didn't. But users, being users, you couldn't tell them that, so Samsung (and the other manufacturers) put it back. It's redundant and unnecessary, but it's wanted so it sells phones. It's the same reason why most manufacturers are baking some sort of "phone optimizer" into their rom's ... to sell phones, because that's the ONLY thing they are good for.

 

[maildroiddev]

Hi,

I setup mobiles for my company.
One of the things I need to do is put the official company email signature on devices before I give them to users.

This proved an unexpected challenge on the Android devices. (We use iphone 6s/7 & S7 Edge running Nougat)

We have an intranet webpage which generates the signature for each user.
The idea is that this allows for cut&paste of the signatures with consistent formatting, rather than manual entry.

The iphone experience:
I select the signature from the webpage (pictures and all) and paste it into the mail app's signature field.
Job done; the signature works, pictures and all.

The Android experience:
If I copy the HTML signature from the browser, and try to paste it into the default mail-app, I get : Maximum number of characters reached error.

...ok so maybe the disclaimer is too long.
NO, it just doesn't work. Somewhere around ~50 plain characters copied from a webbrowser, I get the Maximum number of characters reached error.

My Work around?
My signature-making website also gives me a text-only version (created because of Android).
I copy this from the webbrowser into the memo-app.
Then I copy it from the memo-app to the email-app .....now I can get more than ~50 characters into the signature.

But that only works with plain text, formatting and pictures get screwed up by the memo-app.


So. Is there a better way? If so: What would you propose?

MailDroid allows multiple signatures per account (if you need more then one). It also allows a basic signature where you can use a Rich Text Editor or a Raw HTML feature where you can paste in HTML directly. This may be what you are looking for.