Email signature generator › Gmail on Android

Email signature in the Gmail app on Android

This is the shortest honest answer on the site: the Gmail app on Android will not give you an HTML signature. Knowing that in thirty seconds is worth more than a workaround that does not work.

What the app actually offers

In the Gmail app: Menu → Settings → pick the account → Mobile Signature. It is a plain text field. No formatting toolbar, no paste that keeps styling, no images. Whatever you type is appended as plain text.

This is a deliberate product decision, not a bug or a missing feature, and it has been consistent for years. No amount of pasting from Chrome will change it — the field discards the HTML flavour of the clipboard.

The important consequence

A Gmail account has two signatures: the web signature, set at Settings → See all settings → General → Signature, and the mobile signature in the app. They are independent, and the app uses its own.

So the designed HTML signature you set on the web is not what your recipients see when you reply from the phone. If most of your mail leaves from the phone — and for many people it does — your carefully built signature is the one nobody gets.

The one workaround, and its cost

In the app's account settings there is a switch for the mobile signature. If you clear the mobile signature field and turn it off, the app falls back to the web signature for that account, HTML and all.

The cost is that you get the full desktop signature on a phone reply: three lines of contact details, a logo, and possibly a legal block, appended to a two-word answer. On a narrow screen that reads badly, and on a long thread it repeats.

Which trade is right depends on what your signature is for. If it carries legally required company details, you want it on every message and you accept the clutter. If it is branding, a short plain-text mobile signature usually serves you better than a squeezed logo.

What a good plain-text mobile signature looks like

Name, role, one phone number, one link. Four lines at most, no separator art, no "Sent from my phone" apology. If you need the reader to be able to tap the number, write it in international format with no spaces or brackets — Android turns that into a dialable link, and a number written with dots or slashes often is not recognised.

Why this is worth knowing before you spend an evening

A great deal of advice on the web explains how to paste a formatted signature into the Gmail app. It describes a behaviour the app has not had for years, and following it produces a plain-text signature and a wasted evening. The field discards the formatted flavour of the clipboard; there is nothing to work around.

The reason to say this plainly is that the alternative — the fallback to the web signature — is a real solution with a real cost, and you can only weigh that trade if you know the direct route is closed.

Checking which signature actually went out

Send yourself a message from the phone and open it on a computer. The sent copy in the phone's own view does not always show the signature the way the recipient received it, and the web signature fallback in particular is applied in a way that is easier to confirm from outside.

If you see the plain mobile signature when you expected the HTML one, the mobile signature field still has content in it. Clearing the field is not always enough; the switch has to be off as well.

Several accounts in one app

The Gmail app can hold work and personal accounts side by side, and the mobile signature is set per account. Changing it while the wrong account is selected in the settings list is a common and invisible mistake — the setting saves happily against the account you did not mean.

What to write in four lines

Name on the first line. Role and company on the second. One phone number in international format on the third. One link on the fourth, written in full so it is recognised and made tappable. No separator characters, no quotation, and no "sent from my mobile" — the recipient can tell, and it reads as an apology for replying.

Frequently asked questions