SOLVED for Zimbra Desktop on Mac OSX without trashing account
All
I am using ZD with a google apps account using IMAP. I was as frustrated as you guys but have managed to solve this for my setup without destroying my account. I edited the zimbra-attrs.xml and initially only changed the default value from 10240 to 20480 then tried my longer html signature and got the same error even after quitting and re-starting ZD. Then I theorised that in fact there was no 'value=' argument in the attr line even though there was one in the previous attribute so I added value="0" saved the file then re-started ZD and tried again but still got the same error. However, I then changed the format of my signature from HTML back to plain text then changed it back to html again, re-added my image reference and saved the longer html signature without problem!
Not sure whether it was the adding of the value argument or making the client re-check the attrs file by changing from html to text to html but it worked for me.
Hope this helps some of you.
Try this for Windows users
I found that none of the previously offered solutions worked for me in Windows Vista. So, I dug into the Zimbra source files to find out why.
Zimbra uses a variable named zimbraMailSignatureMaxLength to limit the length of the HTML signature you can use. There seems to be no logical reasoning behind this limit and increasing it doesn't seem to have any negative side effects. This variable needs to be changed in multiple files in order for the maximum limit warning message to go away. Just increase the number I've highlighted in bold below for the line I specify in each file to increase the limit. For my needs, I changed it to 10240 and that was good enough for my signature to not exceed the limit. Here are the file locations and the lines in those files that you will need to modify. This is for the 7.01 version, but should work for some previous versions as well.
C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\Zimbra\Zimbra Desktop\conf\attrs\zimbra-attrs.xml
(NOTE: In XP it would be "C:\Documents and Settings\YOUUSERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Zimbra\Zimbra Desktop\conf\attrs\zimbra-attrs.xml".)
<attr id="454" name="zimbraMailSignatureMaxLength" type="long" min="0" cardinality="single" optionalIn="account,cos" flags="accountInfo,accountInherited">
<defaultCOSValue>1024</defaultCOSValue>
<desc>maximum length of mail signature, 0 means unlimited. If not set, default is 1024</desc>
</attr>
C:\Program Files\Zimbra\Zimbra Desktop\jetty\webapps\zimbra\js\NewWindow_2_all.js
name:"zimbraMailSignatureMaxLength",type:ZmSetting .T_COS,dataType:ZmSetting.D_INT,defaultValue:1024}
C:\Program Files\Zimbra\Zimbra Desktop\jetty\webapps\zimbra\js\Startup1_2_all.js
name:"zimbraMailSignatureMaxLength",type:ZmSetting .T_COS,dataType:ZmSetting.D_INT,defaultValue:1024}
C:\Program Files\Zimbra\Zimbra Desktop\jetty\webapps\zimbra\js\zimbraMail\prefs\Z mPreferencesApp.js settings.registerSetting("SIGNATURE_MAX_LENGTH", {name:"zimbraMailSignatureMaxLength", type:ZmSetting.T_COS, dataType:ZmSetting.D_INT, defaultValue:1024});
Restart Zimbra Desktop after making these changes. You should now have a much larger HTML Signature limit of 10KB instead of the default of 1KB. It's also worth noting that when you install an update for Zimbra it is very likely that it will overwrite these changes. So, you will need to go back and edit them again. Hope this helps anyone else fighting with this issue.