By. 6:30 am, December 5, 2014. It's not super-intuitive, but you can make your own HTML signature for Apple Mail fairly easily.
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Screengrab: Cult of Mac We all like our email signatures to look fantastic. Apple Mail has let you make your special mark with an HTML-style email signature since OS X Lion. The process of setting up an HTML signature in Apple Mail has only gotten more complex over the years, unfortunately. Now it takes a bit of patience and a sturdy sense of adventure, but it’s not too difficult. If you want to create your own HTML signature for Apple’s Mail app on OS X Yosemite, keep reading. How to create an HTML signature for Apple Mail Click here to create a new HTML signature placeholder. Screengrab: Cult of Mac Create a placeholder Apple Mail signature First up, you need to launch Apple Mail.
Then head to the Mail menu. Choose Preferences, then click on the Signatures tab at the top right of the Preferences window. Click on the + button underneath that center pane to create a new signature. OS X will name it Signature #1, and add in your info. You can leave it as is, since you’ll be swapping it out with your HTML signature later. Now, drag the signature you just created over to one of your email addresses in the left-hand pane to associate the signature with the email address.
Close the preferences window and quit Mail. Create an HTML signature HTML is the next step. You’ll need to create your own HTML using a text editor.
The Apple Mail application included with Mac OS X Snow Leopard lets you add a signature to your emails. To add a block of text or a graphic to the bottom of your messages as your personal signature, follow these steps: Toggle navigation. San Francisco, CA Brr, it´s cold outside.
Don’t use Dreamweaver or any other WYSIWYG code editor, as it will tend to add excess code you don’t want. Your code will need inline CSS and should only have basic HTML stuff like divs, images, links and the like. Don’t use any html, head or body tags. Here’s the HTML for my own signature here at Cult of Mac. Feel free to modify it to suit your own needs, or create your own. Rob LeFebvre. Culture Editor.
Cult of Mac.com (408) 320-8874 [email protected] @roblef This is the file you need. Screengrab: Cult of Mac Replace the placeholder with your HTML signature Now you need to find your placeholder signature, which is hidden in your Library folder. In the Finder, click on the Go menu, and hold the Option key down to see the Library folder. Choose that Library folder, and navigate to one of the following folders within. If you’re using iCloud, go to /Library/Mobile Documents/comapplemail/Data/MailData/Signatures/.
If not using iCloud, head to /Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Signatures/ This will be easier to find the folder you need if you enable List view in the Finder ( View, As List, or Command-2). You can also just hit Command-G in the Finder and paste the above file paths in. Either way, your placeholder signature is the most recently modified file that ends with.mailsignature. Open this file in your text editor (if you use TextEdit, be sure to set the Open and Save preferences to Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text) and replace everything below the Mime-Version line with the HTML code you created above.
Lock the file if you’re not using iCloud. Screengrab: Cult of Mac If you’re using iCloud, don’t do this next step. However, if you’re not using iCloud to sync your email (meaning you found your signature file in the second file path above), you’ll need to Lock your file. To do so, click on the Editing arrow to the right of the file name in your text editor. Then check the Locked button in the drop-down dialog. Save the file and quit your text editor. When you open Mail again — or quit and restart it — you’ll find your new signature in the place where you created that placeholder signature.
You won’t be able to see the images in the Preferences pane, but when you create a new message, all the right stuff will show up where you want it. How your new HTML email signature will look in the Preferences and a New Message.
Screengrab: Cult of Mac Now you can make one of those fancy signatures you’ve long admired.
Add a basic email signature in iOS First off, lets see where you add your signature. In iOS, head to the Settings app, and scroll down the left column until you hit Mail. Tap that, and scroll to the last entry in the list: Signature. Tap that, and type in whatever you like. And that’s it.
Whatever you type there will be used as your email signature on all outgoing emails. But anything you type there will also be pretty basic. You can use bold, italic and underlined text by tapping on a word to activate the black bubble popover and choosing one of the text options in there, but that’s it.
To make a fancy signature, you need to create it elsewhere and paste it into this box. One thing to note right away. Any email signatures you create are for that device only. Signatures don’t sync via iCloud, so you must copy the signature between devices if you want it to appear consistently. Thanks to iCloud’s Universal Clipboard, it’s easy to copy something on one device, and then paste it on another.
For instructions, check out our in-depth tutorial on. Getting fancy with Pages For gussying up your text, a great tool is Apple’s own Pages, which you probably already have on one of your devices. If not, it’s and use. To make a signature, let’s create a new, blank document. To do this, open Pages, then tap the plus sign in the top corner. Pick Blank from the templates, and you’re ready to go.
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First, type in your information. Keep it short, because nobody cares about that Werner Herzog quote you like so much. You mightn’t bother with your email address either, because if you’re corresponding with someone via email, they probably already know it. Here’s mine: Pages is a great way to create an email signature.
Photo: Cult of Mac Dull, right? Let’s fancy it up a little. To access Pages’ text-styling tool, tap the little paintbrush icon. This works the same on Mac, iPad and iPhone versions of Pages, although the layout varies depending on screen size. A few tweaks and my signature is looking pretty fancy.
Photo: Cult of Mac Here you see how I changed the typeface, size and color of my initials. I picked Helvetica Thin, upped the size to 30pt, and changed the color to a nice near-fuchsia. I also switched the rest of the text to Helvetica Thin, and fiddled with sizes. Add and style links You may also notice that I removed the underline from the Cultofmac.com link. In Pages, any text can be turned into a link by tapping (or clicking) on it, and choosing Link from the contextual menu. From there, a popover panel appears, letting you customize the URL and the display name.
You can also make the link into an email, or a bookmark link. Many email apps will automatically recognize links anyway, so you may not want bother with this. Adding links is easy. Photo: Cult of Mac To remove the underline from a link, just tap the already-highlighted Underscore button in the text panel (the paintbrush panel that we already used to change fonts). This works great until you paste it into Mail, whereupon the underline is added back. ‘Export’ your text as a signature Now, all you need to do to is select your new signature, copy it, then switch to the Signature section in the Mail settings we discussed above.
Just paste the signature in, and you’re good to go. To add the same signature on other devices, copy the text, pick up the other device and paste it. Pictures in email signatures You may be tempted to add an image to your signature. If you want to, paste it into the signature field, just like we did with text. But remember, not all email apps will display it properly. Some may show an attachment icon instead of putting your cool logo inline with the rest of your signature. Some may fail to show it altogether.
You never know. It may be better, then, to use smart typography to do the job for you. And there you have it. A smart, typographical signature that should survive most mail clients, but that will respect the settings of the recipient, falling back gracefully on plain text if that’s how they choose to read email.
Everyone is happy.
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