A signature on your email can really create a professional looking email template that looks great to the people you send emails to and allows you to display important information about you or your business on every email you send. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a signature in Apple Mail.
The first stage is to create your HTML page which will act as your signature. I have found it best to do this using tables as many mail clients still will not render CSS based pages correctly and it has caused me problems in the past. Maybe these days though this has changed, perhaps you could enlighten me! Below is the code I have used for a simple signature:
<html> <body> <table style="border-top: 1px dotted #999999;" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" width="600"> <tbody> <tr> <td width="200" valign="top"><img src="http://directurl-to-image.com/theimage.jpg" alt="some text" /></td> <td width="510" valign="top"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span> <h1 style="color: #83b74f; font-weight: 200; font-family: 'Yanone Kaffeesatz', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 30px; margin: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px;">Mark Wilkinson</h1> <p style="line-height: 1.7; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px;">Tel: | Email: <a style="color: #333333; text-decoration: none;" href="mailto:youremail@yourdomain.com">youremail@yourdomain.com</a></p> <span style="color: #333333;">Web: <a style="color: #333333; text-decoration: none;" href="http://yourdomain">http://yourdomain</a> | Twitter: <a style="color: #333333; text-decoration: none;" href="http://twitter.com/twitterusername">@twitterusername</a></span> <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 19px;"><span style="line-height: normal; font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></span> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </body> </html>
Once you have the layout of your signature done you need to create your signature in Apple Mail. Before you do this visit the following location on your Mac to see which files are already present; Users/yourusername/Library/Mail/Signatures/. The reason for this is that Mail will put your new signature in there and you nee to know the filename as it will be strange.
Create your signature in Apple Mail like this:
- In Mail, open Preferences and click on the Signatures icon.
- Create a new signature by clicking on the plus icon (you can just leave the signature blank for now).
In Safari you should now open the HTML file that you have created (above) which is your signature. Then you need to save this by following these steps:
- Choose File > Save As and make sure the format is set to Web Archive at the bottom the window
- Save the file inside Users/yourusername/Library/Mail/Signatures/ overwriting the newest file in there, that was created when you added a signature in Mail previously.
Now all you need to do is to close mail and reopen it and your signature should then be present and displaying just like the HTML page that you created.
Leave a Reply