Adding Smiley Faces (Emoticons) to Email Messages in Gmail
Those yellow smiley faces (aka emoticons) are quite popular among young Internet users because they help convey emotion without writing a single word of text.
Yahoo! Mail, AOL and Windows Live Hotmail web clients have excellent support for emoticons but for some unknown reason, Google has not included smileys in Gmail yet.
If you cannot imagine life without Gmail but would still love to see smileys in Gmail, here’s a simple trick for you:
All you need to do is a simple drag-n-drop (very similar to adding signatures in Gmail)
Step 1: Open Gmail and Compose a new email message (or reply to an existing one).
Step 2: In a new browser window, open Yahoo! smileys collection and drag any of the graphic images in to your Gmail editor. As you see in the screencast below, even animated emoticons can be inserted in Gmail emails.
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Why are you promoting HTML mail?
HTML mail is rarely appropriate for use on the Internet, because it reduces the accessibility of mail messages for anyone who happens to be blind. Please, stop promoting inaccessibility.
Sorry, I phrased myself wrong. I meant to write “rarely appropriate for use in Internet mail”.
Hi Amit,
This is really nice tip for GMail users. Almost all uses need this. I can not understand why Gmail does not introduce smiles or emotions in their service. This is really amazing feature but it is not available in Gmail. This feature is also not available in Google Talk. I don’t know whether this type of drawing works in Google Talk………..
Thank for your nice tip…..
Nice tip, Amit. Adds a little fun to Gmail!
To make it easier inserting smileys /emoticons in Gmail messages, I copied and pasted them from your ‘Yahoo! smileys collection’ link to a Gmail message to myself and archived it under a suitable ’smileys’ label. From there they can be readily inserted when composing a message. Works fine.
Thanks for a great blog - I read it regularly.
Aren’t those Yahoo smilies protected by copyright? I doubt Google would be very happy about their users doing this.
actually if you read the link they give permission to use them anywhere you want and even give instruction on how to insert them into gmail and other email clients!
This is very useful to me, I wish I knew it earlier! Thank you for such a useful site. I am now going to regularly read DI.
hey, that is really useful. thanks a lot!
I got this to work while using a windows machine, which was great, but not on a Mac. I have the latest version of Firefox, but still won’t work with it. Any help for me?