Richard Hess was a member of the XFE team (X Windows Front End) at Netscape, working on Netscape Communicator 4.x. The XFE team was responsible for the X Windows workstation platform — one of several platform-specific front-end teams (alongside Mac FE, Windows FE) that each implemented Communicator for their respective OS.
Richard invented HTML signature support in Netscape Messenger (the email client bundled in Communicator) on the X Windows platform. Before the feature was broadly accepted, he had to actively defend it to keep it in the product. Once the Mac FE team implemented the same feature, it became an official cross-platform feature of Communicator.
His ship award for Communicator 4.x reads:
X Editor
"Inventor And Defender of The HTML Sig."
Richard Hess
Communicator 4.*
Everyone who worked on Netscape Communicator was credited in Mozilla's project history when Netscape open-sourced the browser and Mozilla was formed. Richard is listed in the Firefox about:credits page (https://www.mozilla.org/credits/) as a result of his Communicator contributions.