Fixing a Yahoo eMail Signature

Dec. 25, 2012 - PRLog -- An email "signature" is a bit of text, image, and/or link information that's auto-applied by your email application when you compose a new message. In browser-based Yahoo Mail, you define it in the "Mail Options," after which Yahoo tags it onto the end of every message you create. It can include your name, title, contact info, perhaps an image or avatar...whatever you consider an appropriate signature.

The Problem:  You can establish a Yahoo Mail signature, use it practically forever, then one day try to edit it--even shorten it significantly--but they won't allow you to save your changes. "Too long" is all they'll say. One report from the user community even says shortening to a single character can register as "too long."  Yahoo staff doesn't seem to know why--at least they'll never respond except to say they won't respond.  They'll close an issue you open, claiming they've "taken all appropriate action," after doing nothing. They'll never even answer max length questions.

Clearly all that is a dodge; rumors float here and there that upgrading to paid premium service "might" fix it, but there are never any promises, and it can be awfully hard to justify upgrading given the degree of professionalism experienced for very basic support.

The Root Cause:  Some experimentation (which Yahoo should have done, to be honest) reveals that the Yahoo Mail signature doesn't seem to like text pasted in from other applications (such as Microsoft Word, or other)--especially pasted-in text with its own formatting. At time of paste, the Yahoo Mail sig receives that formatting, but then chokes on it.

To fix/modify an existing signature and still be allowed to save the changes, try taking these steps:

  1.  Copy any images you already have in the signature (eg, to your computer's clipboard).
  2.  Convert signature type to a non-rich-text (plain text) signature, and save.
  3.  Convert back to a rich-text signature.
  4.  Paste back in any images (see additional notes regarding images below).
  5.  Re-apply any formatting, including leading spaces, fonts and font sizes, text color, etc.
  6.  Try to save.

These steps seem to work.

To create a new signature from scratch, a nearly identical series of steps can be used.

Max character count, max line count and max link count are still unknown--perhaps there is no limit. You can experiment for yourself, if you have endless material you want in your signature.

More on Images:  If you've used an image successfully in your signature in the past, you should be able to use the same one when correcting your sig (step 1 above assumes you'd use the same one).  If not, you may have to initially host the image on some web hosting location, then copy it from there and paste into the sig, so that Yahoo eMail can know where to go, to get that image each time. In that case, when you paste, you're auto-entering meta-data too, on where the image can be found in some perpetually valid location.  Sometimes this appears to be necessary, and sometimes it seems the Yahoo sig will go ahead and take an image you paste in from your local client machine. Try, and test.

One more thing: If you're allowed to save your changes, you may still find it takes days (some say weeks) before Yahoo gets around to tagging the new signature onto your emails instead of the old one. If the waiting gets too long, re-edit the signature slightly (delete and re-insert a character, then save again), and/or bug Yahoo at customercare@cc.yahoo-inc.com.

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