HelloSign makes signing documents within Gmail a breeze, no printer or scanner required

Here’s something all you productivity nuts will love: a way to easily and quickly sign documents directly within your Gmail account.

In August 2012, the makers of HelloFax – an application that you can use to fill out forms on your computer – came out with a service called HelloSign that lets you digitally sign documents. Today, the HelloSign team released a new Gmail plugin that gives you the power to sign documents without having to download, print, and scan them. All you need to do is click a link next to the attachment and hope you can control a mouse well enough to write your signature.

Digital signature apps are nothing new. We’ve been using a number of them on our computers, Android, and iOS devices for quite some time. HelloSign’s new plug-in was designed to make the process even faster, which is especially nice if you have a job that requires you to sign a ton of documents on a regular basis.

To install the plug-in, either visit HelloSign’s Gmail page, or search for “HelloSign for Gmail” in the Chrome Web Store. Due to the influx of new users, we kept getting errors while trying to install it through the website. Thankfully, it worked when we tried installing it via the Chrome Web Store. 

After you’ve installed HelloSign for Gmail, can check out any old email with a document attached. There, you should see a new option beside “View” and “Download” that says “Sign.” Clicking this will load your document in a pop-up window. You can choose to use an old signature you’ve saved, draw your signature in using your mouse or graphics tablet, or just simply type your name. When you’re done, click the Save and Attached button, and the signed document automatically becomes an email attachment.

We initially had a lot of trouble getting documents to load, probably due to the same reason why we couldn’t sign up via the website’s Gmail portal, but it finally worked after a number of tries. We reached out to the HelloSign team who confirmed the service was having temporary issues; hopefully, things will work more smoothly in the future. 

 Check out the video below for a walkthrough of HelloSign for Gmail.