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.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/insert-smileys-emoticons-gmail-messages/1604/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
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.
Written by Michael B. Trausch on 10.22.07
Sorry, I phrased myself wrong. I meant to write “rarely appropriate for use in Internet mail”.
Written by Michael B. Trausch on 10.22.07
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…..
Written by Ashok Kumar on 10.22.07
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.
Written by Amjad Choudhry on 10.23.07
Aren’t those Yahoo smilies protected by copyright? I doubt Google would be very happy about their users doing this.
Written by Katie G. Hope on 10.31.07
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!
Written by morrigan on 11.20.07
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.
Written by Deepa on 12.03.07
hey, that is really useful. thanks a lot!
Written by nitin on 12.12.07
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?
Written by annie on 03.05.08
I show the smiley face options in many places, but when I try to use them all I get are the codes to show up i.e., :)
Can any one help?
Written by Toni on 12.05.08