The most common way to show an image, smiley or emoticon (as they also known as) in a post on a message forum or in email etc is to hotlink to them. Alot of people don't know what hotlinking is when you tell them but some of those have probably hotlinked before. Basically, hotlinking is allowing images and files to be used on other websites or email etc without the file being used on the originating website. So for example, by entering the right vb code on a vBulletin forum the image would appear as well as be animated if that's how the file is meant to be.

To save a smiley or image onto your computer all you have to do is right click on the image you weant to save and from the menu select save as.. - Then all you have to do is choose a place on your hard drive to store the image. Once on your computers hard drive it is there for good unless you delete it yourself.

To view the file at a later date, you will need some sort of graphics viewer, Irfanview is good for this because if the image is an animated GIF ;like many smileys; it will display the image moving as it was intended to be seen as.

To insert an image or smiley into Thunderbird, visit this site and choose the smiley or sig that you would like to add to your email, left click on the URL box (or if you are using Firefox 3 you can right click on the image and select Copy Link Location..), right click and select copy.

Then goto Thunderbird and click the Image Button as shown in the screenshot below:

Paste the code you got from the smiley or sig page and add like this:

It won't appear animated in the email you're writing but once you send it goto your sent folder and click on the email you just sent and you will see that the smileys and/or sigs are indeed animated!

To insert an image or smiley into Outlook Express, simply Copy Paste the image from the source website straight into Outlook Express where you want the smiley to appear, if the website where the image is stored supports hotlinking then when you send your email, your friend will see the smiley.

Yes! You can now use smileys with Gmail! To do so, click on Settings in the top right of your Gmail window.

Then click the Labs Tab:

Then scroll down till you see the options to Enable Smileys and Images in Gmail.