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Wednesday 23 May 2018

Gmail Signature "Too Long"

I recently found that I had a stash of 500-odd gmails which I had not replied to (oops). In managing those, I decided that it was well past time for me to create a signature.

So, rather than recreate things, I simply cut and pasted one of my existing Outlook signatures into gmail. However, when I went to try and save it, I kept getting a "your email signature is too long" message. Even when I deleted all the characters in the signature box, I still kept getting this error. Hmm....

I did a bit of digging. It is the formatting that we inadvertently copy in from MS products which creates thousands (literally) of hidden characters. This overloads the rather generous 10,000 characters which Google allow you in a gmail signature. In hindsight, I should have realised that the problem was code, but I didn't think of it.

My work-around was to run a two step process. I copied my email signature from Outlook into WordPad, to strip out all the formatting. From there I copied my text only into the gmail signature box (which you find under Settings). In that box I then edited colour, font size etc. I had no trouble saving.

It is not an elegant fix, but it worked without problems.


Sam

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