The day Google broke email signatures...

We are having an interesting time (since yesterday morning) with email signature images in Gmail at the moment.

It's a minor thing, but it reflects poorly on an organisation's digital corporate image (and gets marketing people really hot under the collar).

Google seems to have changed something, somewhere about how signature images in Gmail work, at least for some users/organisations.

Apparently, this affects "a small number" of their clients, according to their tech support (presumably, they change a thing, roll it out to some of their clients and servers and see what happens... and we're in the guinea pig bunch this time).

What you see, if this affects you, is "broken image" icons in emails received by clients and in your own sent items (and existing email conversations) instead of your signature image.

Neither of the work-arounds their tech support suggested... worked.

But I seem to have figured out what *does* work...

Dear Apple. Please stop pretending you're the answer to all of our problems.

This post was prompted by a brief discussion with a teacher acquaintance of mine who has 300-odd iPads at their school, which they have to manage because their IT staff are too busy, and by my observations of the past year or so of iPads and IOS around here, and a lot of time "thinking" about BYOD/1:1. 

You know what irritates sysadmins more than almost anything else?

Vapourware.

What's almost even more annoying?

UsersWhen people with the power to force purchasing decisions (but who lack "tech clue") buy into it. This is a common problem throughout the IT world.

But this post is going to focus on the first of those inter-related problems, because it's one that's quite easy to fix in this example. If you're Apple.