Creating a graphic email signature without attachment

An email that is anything but plain text will usually be sent as a group of attachments. It's the other side's email read that determines whether it appears to them as such or not. Typically this is handled via a setting with words to the effect of "View Attachments Inline." The easiest way to reduce the number of attachments that appear on the far side you can mandate that all email be sent as HTML email, as most email clients (readers) will be set up to display HTML email as email, though many people disable images in HTML email due to various image-based attacks and spam-verification techniques that rely on the automatic display of images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art?

The graphic will not appear for everyone as some email readers cannot render the graphic inline with the rest of the text. On top of that, a graphic in every signature will EAT server space so fast it will make their head spin.

There are only two ways to do it: as an inline "img" HTML tag referring to a graphics file on a server you control, and as an attachment.

Noticed http://lifehacker.com/359543/get-signatures-that-look-handwritten-at-mylivesignature on Lifehacker recently...

Your best shot (in fact, I think, your only shot) is to use HTML e-mail and include it via an IMG tag. Of course, I've got remote image fetching turned off in mail, so I'd never see it unless I went to the trouble to fetch that particular image.

Bottom line: No matter what you do, you cannot force a recipient to see the message as you desire. (Thankfully.) Perhaps this would persuade the client not to push you for a graphic signature in the first place, which would be great.

It is possible to embed the image data directly in HTML-mails, via base64 encoding. I was surprised, too, when i found out about this, but you can in fact use images with src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlh1QBHAKUfAAAAAA8PDxAQ.....". You can encode your image with http://www.greywyvern.com/code/php/binary2base64 tool. But there are major downsides: It is very likely that some spam filters will stop your mails (spammers use encoding too), it's essential that the charset encoding works correctly (on the client side too!), and it may not work at all in a couple of mail clients. And I agree, generally sending mails as plain text is much better.

As noted above, not only will individual spam filters sometimes stop this email attachment type, it could get the domain red listed with one of the big spam filter companies. That is a PAIN to get fixed if it does happen.