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Email signature hosting options after Signature Hound killing free service
depricated
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Signature Hound has suddenly announced it is ending its free email signature hosting service and is switching to a subscription model: https://signaturehound.com/subscriptions
I was already uneasy with the privacy and availability (several issues lately) of serving images from Signature Hound, when a signature should just be HTML. And before anyone says it, yes, I advised against images in signatures but business types love that stuff..
This was a convenient service, especially for non-techies, to quickly create signatures with a few common templates and not have to deal with formatting hell directly in HTML in Thunderbird.
Are there any good alternatives that are free, non-watermarked/etc, and without privacy concerns? Not holding my breath..
Alternatively, what are some good approaches for avoiding such services? One way is to include locally all the image resources in each email, at the cost of ~300KB each time. Or use a free image hosting site or google drive share link?
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Their prices are reasonable. If you love a service, I think it's worth the 19$/y it costs.
Ours is on a public bucket in backblaze, they give you the first 10gb free, and you get 3 times that much egress bandwidth each month, so should be more than enough to handle signature images for emails.
And we already pay monthly for backblaze b2 anyway for offsite backups.
How is it possible to have 300kb by signature ?:)
Even the vcard with larger picture embeded is less than 100kb, and for that, it's just a link when people needs to download it ...
Indeed, if you're cheap, you can put this on imgbb
Personally I would just put it all on your favorite S3 service and never think about it again.
@commercial I got it down to 300KB after shrinking and removing some PNG images. The profile pic alone was 400KB plus some other badges and company logos added another 900KB or so... plus a KB each for several icons. How did you get photos that small?
Yes, I was thinking of using imgbb, as it seems better than imgur or postimage. Opinions?
Own storage would be better for privacy, though I'm trying to avoid "owning" this project.
imagecompressor.com or a similar service
Thanks. I got the smallest results with https://tinypng.com/ and it still results in 300KB.
300 DPI ?;-)
I'd quite like to see that signature
So I discovered I can use Dropbox to store the image resources, generate a share link for each resource, and then create a raw inline file from the share link. This works for embedding inline images in the signature, and has the benefit of retaining control of the files as they are not on a public image sharing site. Seems to solve the problem. Or does it?
I noticed that each time I generate the raw inline file, the URL is different. Will that inline file URL expire?
Not bad
The logo actually was, according to Windows! (10566x2606, 350KB, 300DPI, 32 bit depth >>tinified>> 10566x2606, 190KB, 96DPI, 8 bit depth)
The profile pic went from (600x770, 400KB, 96DPI, 32 bit depth >>tinified>> 600x770, 120KB, 96DPI, 8 bit depth)
You could probably reduce the size to 720x? and go down 72 dpi, compress it again
About Dropbox, I don't know.
I don't care about bandwith, my racknerd hosting is delivered with litespeed, that include an image compression sce an a small free CDN ...
So, I found out the direct links for Dropbox images do expire.
Google Drive direct links get blocked in some cases, seemingly due to cross-origin resource requests.
I might try Github or GitLab, as that still maintains control even if it's public, or give up and just use an image sharing site.
Using own hosting would be easier, but this is for a small business individual without any hosting or website, and I'm trying to keep it simple. And yes, bandwidth isn't an issue.
Thanks, that sounds like a good idea!
Stop trying to use all these services for something they're not meant to be used for. Free tier of whatever S3 provider, put the files in a bucket, link to the files in the bucket. Done. You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be.
Non-sketch, non-trial free tier S3 provider suggestions?
Backblaze B2 first 10GB is free, iirc.
I don't know if it appeals to you but I've got this at webmail.mxroute.com: https://roundcubeplus.com/plugins/signature
Free image hosting I usually use for this similar use case:
Has anyone recently mentioned that you're amazing?! I've been with mxroute for years and didn't know about that signature plugin. It might very well come in handy when updating signatures. Awesome!
Also, by examining the html code exported (yes, no stupid vendor lock-in!), I noticed the image file data are embedded within the signature html in base64 encoding, not sourced as external local files. This might be great for avoiding issues where signatures show up as attachments, at the cost of a bit of extra storage size.
I'm playing with drastically shrinking the image files now, so if I get the whole signature under about 100KB, I might just go with the simple embedded option instead of hosting of remote resources. One less thing to worry about.
I'm not seeing anything about the first 10GB, just a confusing "free egress for up to 3X average monthly storage amount". Am I missing something?
Clever, good to know!
Granted, the current website is a terrible value proposition, but I believe the same pricing is in place. Your only way to be sure is to contact them or sign up unfortunately (which I admit is frustrating).
There's also Cloudflare R2 with 10GB free storage
https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/
Mxroute never ceases to amaze me. Thanks for such a great service @jar
Problem solved, thanks to many ideas in this thread. Thank you all!
The signatures are now shrunk down to 50KB and 74KB, with the images embedded in base64 encoding into the html for the signature, so everything is local.
Many emails are around that size or much larger, so this shouldn't impact storage noticeably. Plus, no concerns about privacy or dependencies on the availability of external servers.
If basic info needs to be updated, the html file can be edited directly. If a new signature is ever desired, it can be made with mxroute's nifty included signature plugin. Fantastic.
For shrinking images, many tools were tried, and the one that worked best was caesium. Awesome, easy-to-use, cross-platform, FOSS program, available as a GUI, command line tool, and even a version that runs directly (locally) in the browser: https://caesium.app/
https://github.com/Lymphatus/caesium-clt
https://github.com/Lymphatus/caesium-image-compressor