Gmail – Random GMail background image

I found a couple quotes from Steve Jobs and Joel Spolsky that I really liked, so I put them in my Gmail signature. I didn't want to forget them as I found other quotes, so I just added them in as well. However, now my signature is longer than the actual emails I was sending, so I, like the question asker, wanted a way to be able to collect my quotes and inject them randomly into my signature.

I couldn't find a working solution, so I held a little mini, solo hackathon in my apartment that started at about 10pm and ended at 3am, once I pushed the code to Github. You can download Random Gmail Quotes from my Github page and install it as an unpacked extension. To replace the quotes I picked, simply edit the quotes.js file -- in your user profile directory -- and replace them with your own. DISCLAIMER: I wrote the extension.

There is another similar Chrome extension on the Chrome Web Store called Random Quotes, but it's two years old and stopped working. However, unlike mine, it has a nice UI where you can paste in your quotes. So, I installed it, figured out what the problem was, fixed it, and submitted a patch to the author's Github account. If you install this one, and you know what you're doing, you can swap out the bsearch.js file with the one I submitted in the issue ticket I created on that author's Github account.

Hope this helps!

From Gmail help topic: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8260

Rich formatting is not available in Gmail's basic HTML view or in your signature settings. At this time there is no way to save customized formatting options as a default Gmail setting.

There is no way to do that with their editor, so no way to make it simple.

However, since such thing is most likely linked to an HTML mail, you can probably do it yourself by writing the email in HTML and putting the background yourself. This is beyond my knowledge, though, and someone else would have to explain how.

Another possibility would be to use Gmail as any mail provider, and send emails from a program like Outlook or Thunderbird, and define background there. But I guess it misses a bit the point, there.