Recently, a blogger friend of mine asked me how I got the social media icons (with links) on my email signature. If you recently received an email from me, then you might’ve seen it too. My email signature contains my name, a link to my blog – JaypeeOnline, links to my LinkedIn profile, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account and my Google profile and at the bottom is a link to my latest blog post.

My “cool” email signature is powered by a Firefox addon/extension called WiseStamp. This is not a new addon and some of you might have heard of it before or probably even using it already (version 1.0 was released back in July of 2008). Anyways, I wanted to share it because I know there are still many people who don’t know about WiseStamp.

WiseStamp lets you customize your email signature – choose the font style, size & color, add images, lets you add RSS feeds – share blog posts, bookmarks, videos, quotes, etc., add links to social media and social networking profiles/accounts – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Flickr, FriendFeed, Digg, Plurk, MySpace, Tumblr, IM services and many more. With WiseStamp, you can also create multiple email signatures that you can use for personal or business emails.

To know more about WiseStamp, here’s a quick video tour:

WiseStamp features:

• Personally designed signatures
• Easy setup and configuration interface
• Use multiple email signatures (Business and Personal)
• Rename signatures
• Signature Rich Text editor (WYSIWYG Editor-choose color and font)
• Add your personal feeds (rss)
• Add your logo or image to your signature
• Automatically insert your signature to your webmail services
• Supports to all webmail functions- Compose Mail, Reply, and Forward
• Easily Include all your IM (Instant messaging) ID’s + Icons
• Easily link to all of your Social profiles & Services + Icons
• Manually add your signature at mouse cursor location
• preview while editing Signature
• Simple control- switch signature on/off
• Support for special characters
• Works with Gmail, Google App’s, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL and more…

Advanced features:

• Option to treat each signature as HTML
• Full Ltr & Rtl languages support
• Add your personal signature to any online Html supported page (Google Docs…etc)
• Supports Firefox 2 & Firefox 3

Screenshots:
General

Settings

Preview

Email Signature

By default, WiseStamp will automatically insert an email signature when you compose an email. This feature can be turned on/off from the settings page. If you have multiple email signatures, it will select the default signature that you specified in the settings page. To access WiseStamp or edit your existing signatures, just click on the WiseStamp icon found on the bottom part of your browser or via Tools > WiseStamp.

Right now, WiseStamp is available as an extension for Mozilla Firefox, Flock, Google Chrome and Mozilla Thunderbird. It also works with most webmail providers – Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL, etc.

The email signature I’m using is a pretty simple one. I’ve seen other email signatures that are more fancy and more creative. If you’re having a hard time designing or choosing a template for your email signature, you might want to check out the WiseStamp signature template gallery for some inspiration.

To download the WiseStamp extension or learn more about it, visit WiseStamp.com.

In case the download links won’t work for you, here are the direct links to the extensions:
Mozilla Firefox & Thunderbird, Flock
Google Chrome

What do you think of the WiseStamp Firefox extension? Anyone else using WiseStamp email signatures? What other features or options would you like to see added to WiseStamp? Please share your thoughts.

Remember the Gmail outage that happened about 2 weeks ago? It lasted about 4 hours causing users to panic and left many “stranded” because they were not able to send or receive emails. What most users didn’t know is that the web version of Gmail was the only one affected or inaccessible. For those people who use Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and other third-party email clients, it was business as usual.

That’s only one of the advantages of using a desktop client for accessing your webmail like Gmail. With an email client you can also compose or reply to emails while you’re offline, save them as drafts and send them later when you get connected to the Internet. You can also create lots of Folders/Subfolders and use filters to manage your emails. Most if not all email clients let you access several email accounts at once.

If you’d like to avoid the hassle and problems of another Gmail outage, I suggest you install an email client. Today, I’m gonna share with you an email client that lets you access all types of email accounts including Yahoo! Mail. This app that I’m talking about is called the Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop.

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop is an offline client that lets you manage your various email accounts in one desktop tool. Zimbra mail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, Outlook and any other work or personal email account using POP or IMAP is easy to set up in Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop. Each account is separately maintained.

Zimbra Desktop is a free, open source application created by Zimbra, a Yahoo! company that specializes in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software. It is easy to install and is multi-platform so you can install it on a Windows, Mac or Linux powered computer. I’ve installed it on my Ubuntu partition and it works smoothly. If not for all the custom folders and message filters that I already have on my Mozilla Thunderbird, I would’ve switched to Zimbra Desktop.

Screenshots:

Here’s the full list of features:

Key features

• Email, contacts, calendar, and documents all in one application
• Syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail email, contacts and calendars
• Read email from any POP or IMAP email account including AOL, Hotmail or business email
• Works on Windows, Apple, or Linux desktop computers
• No limit to the size of your email storage
• It works online and offline
• Available in 20 languages

Feature details

Email

• Easily compose, edit, delete, reply, or make drafts
• “Drag and Drop” messages into new folders or the Trash
• Supports plain text and html message formatting
• Add email signatures for each account and automatically reply with the correct “from” address
• Compose email even when you are not online-messages you send are saved in the “Outbox” and are sent when you connect again
• Supports any POP or IMAP email plus Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail

Conversation Views, Tags, and Search

• Collapse email threads into a single Conversation View to simplify your inbox
• Tag messages as important from people you care about
• Quickly search your mailbox for pictures, documents or text-even with attachments
• Use Advanced Search to easily search by folder, date, person, subject or attachment
• Save searches as Virtual Folders- for example “All email with attachments from Joe”
• Now features built-in support for Yahoo! Inquisitor

Web mash-ups

• View addresses as Yahoo! Maps
• Automatically detect your location and find points of interest with Yahoo! Local
• Preview web pages at thumbnails instead of opening a browser
• See your calendar schedule from within an email message if you hover over a date
• Web Search powered by Yahoo! is built directly into Zimbra Desktop
• Automatically save pictures to Flickr

Contacts

• Store all your contacts in one place for all your accounts
• Create groups and tags to organize them
• Add photos to contacts
• Auto complete email addresses when composing email
• Easily import new contacts from other applications as .csv files or export contacts as .csv files for backup
• Syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! and Gmail contacts

Calendar

• Manage multiple color-coded calendars
• View calendars in Day, Week, Work Week, Month or List view
• “Fisheye” in the Month view let’s you easily view and edit events
• Drag and drop’ events to new days or to change times
• Import public web calendars (iCal format), such as sports schedules
• Invite others to meetings and view free/busy times
• Syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! and Gmail calendars

Documents, Tasks, Briefcase

• Edit Documents including add images, tables and spreadsheets; share them in email
• Track your to do’s including start and end dates, percent complete
• Save attachments in Briefcase rather than as message attachments
• Works with any account you set up

For now, you only have limited access to a few Yahoo! Mail apps (Zimlets) like Flickr and Maps and you won’t have Drop.io that lets you attach 100 MB files. I plan to install Zimbra Desktop on my other laptop so that my wife would have easier and faster access to her Yahoo! Mail acount.

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop is very easy to install and setup. If you need help with the installation or issues you might encounter, you can contact Zimbra support or visit the Zimbra Desktop Forum. If you need further information or want to download it, visit the Zimbra Desktop page.

In case you guys want a detailed and step-by-step guide (including screenshots) on how to install Zimbra Desktop on Windows or Ubuntu, just let me know and I’ll create one.

Anybody else using an email client to access their Gmail or other webmail accounts? What email client are you using? What do you think of Zimbra?

I signed-up last Friday but I was too busy and didn’t have time to do it. So if you noticed any downtime earlier, that because I was setting up my account, moving all my files and restoring my backups and finished around 1 AM Sunday morning. I supposed to finish this entry and publish it but I was so sleepy. The transition went well and I didn’t have any problems restoring my backups. The only thing that caused delay was me trying to get used to Dreamhost’s user panel. It’s totally different from Cpanel of which I’ve been using for a long time.

I’d also like to thank the guys at IGB for hosting my blog totally free for several years. You’ve been a great help to me and for JaypeeOnline.Net and I will never forget your kindness and hospitality.

Other Updates:

First update: When WordPress 2.1.3 was released, I wasn’t able to upgrade my installation right away because I was more worried about the problems I was experiencing within my blog. The only time I was able to upgrade was when I moved to Dreamhost. It was also easy coz they have a One-Click install section where you get to choose different programs like WordPress, Joomla, phpBB and have it installed for you with just one click of a button. All I had to do was upload my custom files and restore my database using phpMyAdmin.

Second update: I installed a plugin called Edit Comment created by Andrew Sutherland. What it does is that it enables blog readers to edit their comments within a specified time limit. This is useful because there are times when readers want to change or add something to their comment or sometimes correct a misspelt word and couldn’t do it because they’ve already hit the submit button. I know how it is coz I’ve experienced it a lot of times myself while leaving comments on other blogs. I’ve configured the plugin to let readers edit their comments within 30 minutes. Please let me know if it doesn’t work or if you experience problems with this feature.

Third update: I’m slowly switching to Gmail. If I frequently visit your blogs, you might notice that I’m using a new email address. I now use one of my Gmail accounts as my primary email account for blogging and for personal use. One of the main reasons why I made the switch is because of the POP access which I couldn’t do with Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail without using a third-party program. With Gmail, I can download email on my desktop using Thunderbird or in my Pocket PC. I’ll still be using my Yahoo! accounts but only for backup purposes and other subscription details.