Droid Doesn’t: Attach Signatures to Email but the Droid Eris Does

The Motorola Droid is a good device with some really strange design decisions. The unnecessary “chin” on the right side that makes typing not only difficult but also painful with the potentially nerve damaging placement of the chin corner in the middle of my right palm comes to mind. Then, there’s the decision to remove the ability to use the pinch-to-zoom gesture that nearly everyone expects these days. But, one of the strangest decisions was not to provide a way to automatically attach signatures to email messages. This feature is available in the Gmail client. But, you cannot attach a signature to outgoing mail on any other account type (POP3, IMAP, Exchange Server).

While this might seem minor, it is very important to those of us who use our mobile phones for business related email. I, for example, always attach a short signature that lets people know that the email was written on an iPhone or some other smartphone. This reduces the need to explain why an email message might be terser than usual. And, I’m not the only one who feels this is an important missing feature based on the comments in this Android issue item on Google Code…

Issue 4588: Email app should allow automatically adding a signature over Exchange

To make matters even more interesting, the less expensive Eris Droid also sold by Verizon has the ability to add a signature to outgoing mail on any mail account type. Here’s the instructions for the Eris…

Editing your Eris Droid email signature

To edit your non-Gmail email signature, open the Mail application. Click on the “menu” icon to get a sub-menu to open. Often, the keyboard opens when I try to open this menu. I just close the keyboard and try again. The sub-menu will give you 6 options – Refresh, Folders, Sort, Delete, Compose, and More. Click on More, then Settings, then General Settings, and then edit your signature to your heart’s content.

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