Sent from my

When you get a message from someone using a free email service like Hotmail or Yahoo mail, you might get irritating ads at the end of the message. Apparently gadget makers think this is a pretty neat idea. The so-called smart phones also have this “feature”. Here’s what I sometime get at the end of my Emails:

Sent from my BlackBerry

Sent from my iPhone

Sent from my iPad

Sent from my Nexus One

And worst of all:

Sent from my Verizon Wireless Blackberry

If I had one of those devices I would try to delete this junk right away. Nobody sane would write “Sent from my PC while eating Nachos” at the end of every single mails, right? Well no ... It turns out that some people are already doing this kind of thing. On hardware forums you will see signatures like this:

Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.2GHz, Sapphire HD5850 Toxic Edition, Intel X-25M 80GB SSD, ASUS P6TD Deluxe, Corsair TX850, Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1600 RAM, Corsair H50 Hydro Series

The fellas posting this kind of information on Internet aren’t trying to get help to make sure all their computer’s components are compatible. They are bragging about how great their computer is. I think this is the same with smart-phones, people don’t delete these signatures because it makes them feel good. What’s the point of owning a Ferrari if you can’t show it to the world? “Man, I have an iPhone 3G; aren’t you impressed?”

Side note: the headers User-Agent or X-Mailer are supposed to contain information about the Mail User Agent. It looks like the right place to put something like ‘Sent from my’, but none of those devices add these headers. Not visible enough I guess.