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Gmail Hiding Sigs and Copypasta: Cool or Whack?

gmail-morecopypastabuttonI bet your answer depends on whether you’re the one receiving the mail or sending it, right, whether or not  you like how Gmail conceals your sig and any copypasta you or the other guy dumps in with one of these more/expand buttons most people won’t click (pic related)?

Here let me show you what I’m talking about in case you didn’t already notice on your own. I’ll have a conversation with myself to illustrate this:


So on the first email, as you can see it truncated half of what would look like a casual sig, my name, though it left Best regards intact. But jumping down to the last email, I substituted Inappropriate in for Best regards, and I guess it didn’t trip the sig alarm (I’m interested in how Google detects sigs and copypasta). Who sends inappropriate regards, right? What does that even mean?

In the second email, I pasted in Samsung’s legal mumbojumbo. On my first test I prefaced it with “okay here’s the copypasta below:” with a colon at the end, and it didn’t clip off the copypasta, but in the above screenshot, I did not use a colon, and it truncated that very copypasta. So maybe it’s the colon setting it off as identifying copypasta that is probably relevant to the other guy’s interests. Maybe google clipped it off because it crawled Samsung’s site and knows it’s definitely verbatim copypasta, and who wants that. Interesting! What’s your secret, Gmail?

I thought it might be Google, which autosaves your email frequently as you type it, detecting the rate at which you added text, and if you suddenly add five paragraphs, that’s its clue. Maybe it uses multiple ways. Whatever it is, they put some thought into it, Google tries to make the web a better place, me, I hate copypasta and sigs, but one time I wrote an email, took out a paragraph and pasted it into notepad for reconsideration, wrote more of the email, dumped the paragraph in at the end of the email, and yep, it got truncated. That was irritating. So the next time I ran into that situation I switched to using Thunderbird (poor man’s Outlook) to dodge truncating, which worked.

So, two questions, maybe three questions, do you like how Gmail does this? Would you like it better if they gave you some sort of a toggling option? Do you know of any tricks to prevent Google from clipping off your sig or copypasta in things you send to people?

Also, and don’t ask me why — I was just curious — I put “sperm bank” into a Google Maps search on my phone a week ago, actually more like three weeks ago. And even now Google AdWords seems to think I’m a lesbian (not that there’s anything wrong with that)! True story.

Doug Simmons

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