Creating an HTML signature in Apple Mail
writes about design
Tired of that plain text e-mail signature that I’ve been using for years, I recently endeavored to create something a bit more professional and refined for my e-mails.
Apple Mail allows you to control the font, color, and even insert images (which are included as attachments) into a signature. But it doesn’t give you direct control of the HTML and CSS, nor does it provide a solution for including images in your e-mail without them being attachments.
These limitations meant that I first had to design the HTML and CSS of my new signature outside of Mail, and then save that HTML file as a Mail signature. Here’s how it’s done.
Designing the HTML/CSS
From my experience designing HTML e-mail templates for FireFly Transmit, our e-mail campaign application, I was already familiar with the obstacles of designing HTML e-mails. Since there are literally dozens of different e-mail clients out there, you have to design for the lowest common denominator to ensure that your e-mail looks decent in each (see the E-mail Standards Project). Here are some of the basics to keep in mind as you design your signature:
- Use tables for basic layout. The CSS float property is not supported in Gmail or Outlook, making CSS layouts impractical.
- Use inline CSS. The style tag is not supported in Gmail, and support for CSS selectors is spotty.
- Only use basic CSS properties. E-mail clients tend to be very picky about which CSS properties they support. Campaign Monitor has a great summary of CSS support in e-mail to use for reference.
- Use absolute URLs. Obviously, relative paths won’t work for an e-mail signature. All of your links should be absolute.
- Link to images. Personally, I dislike it when someone sends an e-mail to me with an attachment that is just their signature image or background file (it makes scanning for other e-mails with legitimate attachments more difficult). Because of this, I recommend linking to your images by placing them on a web server rather than including them as attachments.
- Exclude HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags. When we get ready to save your HTML signature into Mail, make sure that only the relevant HTML is included in your document.
I created my signature with a two-column table—logo in the left cell and text in the right cell. I placed each line of text inside its own DIV so that I could use inline CSS to format each line. I ran into a problem with the spacing between the phone number and company name; padding didn’t work correctly in Outlook 2007, and margin didn’t work in Windows Live. I ended up inserting an additional DIV between the two and giving it a fixed height, which solved the spacing problem in all e-mail clients. You can view my HTML (feel free to use it as a starting point for your own signature).
Saving the Signature into Mail
Once you have created the HTML for your e-mail signature, the next step is to get the signature into Mail. (A thanks to Melvin Rivera and Mez Hopking for introducing me to this technique.) It’s actually pretty simple:
- 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).
- Quit Mail.
- In Safari, open the HTML file that you created.
- In Safari, go to File > Save As. Then, navigate to Your Home Folder > Library > Mail > Signatures. We want to overwrite the signature that you just created in Mail. Click on the existing signature file, make sure that the format is set to “Web Archive,” and hit Save. (If there are multiple files in this folder, switch the save dialog to the list view. The signature that you just added in Mail should be the file that was last modified just a few minutes ago.)
- Re-open Mail. Voila!
Testing
Don’t forget to thoroughly test your new signature across multiple e-mail platforms. If you don’t have access to a particular e-mail platform, take a look at Litmus, which can generate screenshots of how your e-mail is rendered in many e-mail clients.
Also, since there are still some people—and quite a few handheld devices—that do not read HTML e-mails, it would be a good idea to test the plain text version of your signature. By default, Mail sends every e-mail as a multipart message, with both an HTML version and a plain text version. In Mail, select an e-mail that has your signature. Then, press Command + Option + U to view the source of the e-mail. You will see many lines of header information, the plain text version of the e-mail, followed by the code view of the HTML version of the e-mail. My signature turned out nicely in plain text.
Wrapping Up
If you decide to create your own HTML e-mail signature—or already have one—we would love to see it! Please shoot me an e-mail and show it off! Also, let me know if you would allow us to display it in an “e-mail signature inspiration” gallery that we are considering doing as a future post.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
You can also copy any HTML from a web browser (just highlight the content) and paste it into the signature box. It eliminates quite a few steps.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:58 am
Can’t seem to get this to work guys — either way. Do I name to file in the library/mail/signature to replace the long string file name (DF9JH-7DRT….)?
Can’t just paste the code into the signature box either.
Thanks for your help.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:30 pm
hey, thanks a lot for this info! I’m trying to embed an image in the mail, just as if I were doing it from outlook but haven’t found a solution to it yet. I don’t want to link it to an http site… just embed it. Any ideas? thank you!
German
http://www.3dar.com VFX / Visual effects studio
April 4th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Hi guys…
I hoped that there would be an EASY way to send HTML email but I dont get it! Why is such a simple task this difficult? Why do we have to hack ourselfs into this? I followed all the steps above but it doensn’t work. Why is Apple not making this an option in Leopard Mail? You can send HTML mail from templates within Mail but you cannot drag and drop a webpage into mail and make an emailing out of it! I am searching for a way to do this for a long time now and I still did not find a way… I am really frustrated!
Hensen
April 4th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Hey guys, thanks for the comments. Xac, I tried pasting my signature into the signature box in Mail preferences, but couldn’t get it to work. The design seemed to look OK at first, but Mail adds some of its own formatting which drastically altered my signature. It seems to me that the solution I outlined above is the only sure-fire way to get the signature exactly like you want it.
Craig, the key is to replace one of the existing files in the signatures folder. So yes, click on one of the existing files with a long name, and then press “Save” to overwrite that file. It won’t work if you just save a new file to that folder; you must overwrite one of the existing files (preferably the one you just created a few steps earlier).
German, the only problem with embedding an image in the e-mail is that every message you send will appear to have an attachment in it, which can be misleading. But if you’re OK with that limitation, Mail certainly allows you to embed an image. The easiest way to add an image into your signature is to open up Mail > Preferences > Signatures, and then drag and drop a photo from finder into the signature pane. Mail will automatically resize the image to around 65px square.
April 8th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Hi there,
Thanks for this - great help!
The only problem I’m having is that although I set the text links in my dreamweaver html document to a specific colour for links, rollover links, visited links and active links, and to only show underline on rollover (done in Page Properties), when I look at the signature in Mail and when I view test emails in google mail, the link have gone back to the default blue and puple for visited links. Can I stop Mail doing this?
Thanks for your help!
Best wishes,
David
April 14th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Hey David,
I can tell you what the problem is. You will remember I mention in the article that you are not supposed to include HTML, HEAD, or BODY tags in the signature. When you define link attributes in the Page Properties dialog in Dreamweaver, it actually specifies those values in the BODY tag. To get your signature to work correctly, you have to use inline CSS to style your links. That should take care of your problem.
Tyler
April 24th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Thanks! Working great now - fantastic resource
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:21 am
Thanks for this tutorial it was exactly what I needed. One question, can I use the tag to define the link colours in my email? In my sig I want to put clickable links to both my website and email address. Something like this:
[div style=”color: #A1A0A4; font-size: 10px; line-height: 14px;”] Email: [a]martyn@spinifexgroup.com[/a][/div]
May 27th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Tyler,
Everything that I have done works fine, up until I compose the mail and send it. I get the missing image icon (blue box with a question mark) for the two images that I have in the signature. I think I have done everything correctly, but it doesn’t matter what I do now, I always get the same two boxes. Any ideas as to what can help this? Thanks!
-Chris
May 29th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Martyn, yes, you can use inline CSS to define the color of the link. Looking at the example you posted, the problem is that you are applying the color only to the div. You would also need to specify the color to the A tag in order to override the default blue.
Chris, it sounds like your problem is probably being caused by the use of a relative link. It will not work if you are trying to reference an image just on your harddrive. The image has to be on a web server, and you must reference it through an absolute path. (One reader has suggested using your .mac account’s web server.)
Hope this helps!
May 31st, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Tyler, I have the same problem as Chris, but my images are hosted on a webserver. I FTP’d them myself and I double checked the code. what now?
June 8th, 2008 at 2:06 am
[...] though quite a tedious one. Already people have written great stuff on it like All Forces, Paradigm Reborn and Gathering in Light. I’ll summerize the [...]
June 27th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Tyler,
Your explanation help very much. Works fine except for my images.
They preview find in Safari but when I look in Mail Preferences (Apple Mail) the image holders are there but no images.
I used absolute links and have checked every letter of every link.
The images are hosted on my site. I uploaded them myself. The names are exactly correct.
Any suggestions?
Heres the link to the html I created in dreamweaver to preview in Safari that worked fine. http://www.strengthbank.com/emailsig/emailsigSB.html
June 27th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
I’ve received several responses from people saying that they are placing absolute links to their images stored on a web server, but that the images appear broken when viewed in the Apple Mail preferences pane.
Don’t be alarmed — my images don’t show up when I view my signature in the preferences pane either. However, the images do show up when I actually send an e-mail.
So to accurately test your signature, you need to send an e-mail to yourself. The preference pane won’t display your signature accurately.
Good Luck!
July 5th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Tyler-
I used your template to create a HTML signature for my uncle, who uses a Mac, and I have run into a problem: in mail it looks as I designed it, but in Outlook and IE, it shows up with a large space running down the middle. How can I change that?
Below is the link:
http://maxnorman.net/creations/mannix%20signature.html
Thanks!
Max
July 20th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
[...] though quite a tedious one. Already people have written great stuff on it like All Forces, Paradigm Reborn and Gathering in Light. I’ll summerize the [...]
July 28th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Top resource! Any ideas how to do similar for Entourage 2004???
Here’s my first attempt, very heavily based on Tylers… How do I kill the default styling of the email address, although does anyone put an email address in an email signature?? Seems overkill…
<td width=”109″ valign=”top”
August 15th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Hi people, i also was trying to get a signature in mail, but have very little experience with html etc, i found out you can copy paste images out of photoshop straight in your signature box .. I dont know how this is seen on the various mail clients but so far so good, maybe this is a simple solution ?
then again maybe not hehe
anyway thanks voor the info ! greetings
August 16th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Tyler,
Thanks for the tutorial and the template. I’ve been messing with this for an hour. Everything looks great until I send a message to one of my own email accounts. Then all the html is stripped from the way the message appears and all I get is a text signature. Do you know what causes this strange behavior? I’d love to get to the bottom of this and get on to something else.
Thanks, Muchly!
Rick
August 20th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Several of you are trying to figure out how remove the default styling of links in your signatures. The key is using inline CSS in the link tag. For instance <A style=”color: #000000; text-decoration: none;”> and so forth.
Regarding an easier way to get a single image into your signature, it is possible to copy and paste or drag and drop an image from your computer into the signature preferences pane. However, you will have very little control over the appearance, and that image will be sent as an attachment on every e-mail you send.
Rick, be sure that you are using inline CSS. Some e-mail clients will strip off the styles that you define in a stylesheet.
September 10th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Works just great.
You’ve solved one of my big mysteries.
Thanks so much…
September 13th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Awesome Tyler!
I whipped my signature together in minutes using your template and now I have a highly professional look.
You Rock!
October 8th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Big Thanks! Great resource.
October 26th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Hi,
I have added my signature in leopard mail. but image in outlook comes as attachement. Do any body have has any idea to display the pic at the end of the messge body in outlook. Please help. image i tried with as JPG and GIF both format.
Satish
October 26th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Tyler:
I brag about my success too soon. I did not know what I had done to mess up the signatures. Anyway, I have everything fine in the preference pane, including images and links. However, when I use a new mail, the images would not come to the page but question marks. The links are there however. What did i do wrong?
Thanks.
Robert
November 17th, 2008 at 2:51 am
Hey..
i am unable to even add a new signature in my apple mail. it just gets deleted immediately or it doesnt’ work. is there any other solution than to re-install the mail?
thanks,
puppu
November 24th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
THANK YOU! You saved me so much frustration!
Love,
bridget
November 26th, 2008 at 9:39 am
An additional tip: You can kick it up a notch by including a GIF with recent headlines from your blog or other RSS feed by using FeedBurner’s Headline Animator: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/headlineanimator
January 1st, 2009 at 8:29 am
Hi guys,
Great work,
It works fine on my mac but on another mac I have Mail 1.3.11,
It doesn’t seem to have a signatures folder.
all it has is a signatures.plist file and has no web archive files.
Also the software doesn’t has any option to add images as signature.
do you know where those files are stored, or there is another way to make it work?
January 10th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Sweet! I am a newbie to MACs and your outline worked like a charm.
I simply replaced your details with mine. Thanks! Appreciate your willingness to provide the details as well as your patience with us in making it happen!
Gina
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Hi,
I cannot get it to work and now non of my other (plain text) sigs work??
In the Pref pane I can see the html text with a Q:Marked box for the image, however when I go to send or even send one completely - there is nothing??
Can you please help me!?!
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:44 pm
My apologies.. I didn’t select the sig from the drop down menu in the email.
I’ve never had to do that before, usually it adds the signature automatically, but if that’s the only down-side, that’s a good thing.
Thanks very much for your help.
Van
January 24th, 2009 at 6:36 am
Hi Tyler,
Come across your tutorial & looks fab thanks….
One question though - have got my Signature HTML file ready to go - but can’t find the folder to put it in…
When I go to Libary > Mail I get Account Types folder > com.apple.builtin.mailaccounts > MailAccounts.plist - and can’t seem to find a signatures folder - where am I going wrong??
Thanks very much,
Antonia
January 24th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Hi Tyler - sorry for last message - saw that I was supposed to start at home - all looking great thank you!
Antonia
February 4th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Hey thanks a lot, your method worked for me.
I was going nuts trying to figure out how to make a signature. Seems no one bothered to QA the mail app for signature creation before release, or are even bothering to fix it.
Bad Apple no cookie!
February 25th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Thank you so much for the tutorial!
I found a few before this that had me going into Terminal to fix the link/embed image problem. Boy was that a disaster! Haha! I’m so glad I don’t need to go through a crash course in textutil.
February 28th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Hi there. I don’t know if you bother checking this anymore, but I thought I’d give it a try.
My html is very simple: it’s just an absolute image tag (http://www.c313ste.com/images/signature.jpg)
I see the image in my mail when I attach it as a signature, but it’s not there once I send it.
Does anyone else have this problem?
March 7th, 2009 at 9:44 am
I have used this successfully in Tiger but in Leopard I am having trouble. When I create the new email signature, it does not appear as a .webarchive in user/library/mail/signatures list? So I cannot complete the process with Safari SaveAs Is the .webarchive going somewhere else? All my other sigs are there in fine shape but cannot seem to add a new one. Have tried 5 times. Please adivse.
March 17th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Great, thanks for posting. Just “borrowed” your template for a mod
I’ve always set Apple Mail to plain text - until just now after a series of complaints from Outlook users. It turns out that if you send them plain text e-mail containing an attachment in the middle, the remained of your text will be incorrectly attached in a .txt file (sometimes blank, depending upon where your attachment is). After some tests we found that this issue could be resolved by using rich text. So a flashy signature was just the token to celebrate solving this issue!
March 26th, 2009 at 7:44 am
Hmmm… I’ve tried this a few times now but always the image displays as a ? even when I send a message to someone else. Obviously tit is not finding the image on the remote server - and yes I have used an absolute address and not a relative one. Does anyone have any ideas?
April 18th, 2009 at 12:51 am
Did any solve the blue box with question mark problem? I am several hours into this and can’t seem to get it to work. The link to the image works in safari but not in mac mail. I have read all of the post and tried the solutions with no luck.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:03 pm
In response to Chris, Christina and Celeste (all the C’s) and Eric and Blanny.
I found that if I just included an image in the signature it wouldn’t work - however if I put the image within a it worked perfectly. Perhaps this method simply doesn’t work with a lone tag.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:04 pm
ah the comment engine stipped my html tags - to repeat:
In response to Chris, Christina and Celeste (all the C’s) and Eric and Blanny.
I found that if I just included an image in the signature it wouldn’t work - however if I put the image within an HTML TABLE it worked perfectly. Perhaps this method simply doesn’t work with a lone HTML IMG tag.
April 22nd, 2009 at 7:13 pm
I came across this resource & have been trying for a while to get it to work. I’ve sliced up my html design & put the files on my web server. I am able to save over the new signature that I create in Apple Mail & it shows up in the mail preferences window. But when I send an email the sliced boxes appear with blue question marks. When I try sending test emails, they don’t show up.
How do I change the absolute link? I’m not sure how to do this OR if that’s what I’m doing wrong.
If anyone has any help, that’d be great. Thank you!
May 6th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Sorry to bug you, but I hope you still look at this.
I have followed everything perfectly as far as I can tell. Everything shows up fine, but when I send it, the viewer never gets it, including myself. I straight up used yours just to test it and each time I send it, it never shows up. Any advice?
Thanks
May 6th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Hi everyone,
Sorry that some of you have been having trouble. Just a reminder that any image that you want to be included in your signature must be uploaded to a web server, and you must refer to it with an absolute URL (i.e. http://www.mysite.com/myimage.gif). Make sure that you have included “http://” in your URL.
If you still can’t get it to work, send your .webarchive file as a regular attachment to me at tyler@paradigm-reborn.com and I will see if anything jumps out at me.
Thanks,
Tyler
May 18th, 2009 at 4:47 am
Very interesting to get some good information on this subject.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:08 am
Is there any way to combat the way Outlook or Windows Mail won’t download images automatically?
The default setting is that users have to click on the info bar to download embedded images. Generally the image in my signature will show up as the square with a red X in it.
June 10th, 2009 at 4:53 am
Cheers Mate ! Very Helpful in deed.
July 6th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Just created a signature using your template. Works super great. Thanks for your work and willingness to share.
July 15th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Thanks for this very elegant solution to powerful email signatures. Mine works fine when I create an email from within Mail. However, when I create an email by using the File > Send To > Mail Recipient (As Attachment) option in such programs as Word and Excel, the resulting signature does not retain its formatting.
Any thoughts?
August 14th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
For those of you who are having trouble getting images to show up after doing a test send, make sure that you have “Rich Text” chosen as the message format.
You can set this under the “Composing” tab of the Preferences. If you don’t have this set, your message will look great on your end, but once you send it, only a plain text version will go through.
August 16th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
WOW… I am frustrated. I created the email template… used an absolute link for the graphic… saved it as a web archive in place of an existing signature… and made sure I was using rich text.
The image shows up just fine in my draft message… but when I SEND the email and look at the raw source of the received email… there isn’t even an image tag to be seen.
Unbelievabe. Any thoughts?
August 17th, 2009 at 3:11 am
Thanks for sharing this info. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. It’s true that adding an image that is not hosted online can be off putting to recipients. I used to have an image like that and clients didn’t like it that they could not search for my other attachments when they were looking for something, and it was also a problem for me when searching for an attachment I’d sent.
Do you have any recommendation on the best place to host the image online?
Thanks!
Karrie
August 18th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Well bloody hell. It works!
I have looked for this type of guide on and off for a longtime and have never got one to actually work. Thank you very much for taking the time to post this.
I can now get on and start creating email sigs that I wanted. I actually switched to Thunderbird for a little while just because of HTML signature support.
August 25th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I need you to walk me through this…
Because I don’t know how to design the HTML/CSS, I will need you to layman-me through this.
I have my signature. It’s a gif. I want it to link to my website. How do I apply the url to this image?
September 7th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Really great article!
I have created a signature, however have a little difficulty - when i am saving the signature file in signatures, although it seems to be overwriting existing webarchive file, when I view it in mail, it does not appear to be changed.
… anybody can help?
October 5th, 2009 at 7:18 am
I’m having nothing but problems with the absolute links. I’ve got my image hosted on my companies site… no matter what I do it always comes up as a broken link.
I’ve just got to change this link in dreamweaver in the ‘img src’ tag right? This seems so obvious, its just not having it.
Is this right?
http://www.whitelightmedia.co.uk/images/wlm.gif
October 5th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Oh, I’ve been out a few hours and now it seems to work. Nevermind. Great stuff though!
October 10th, 2009 at 9:17 am
For those having issues with writing the image HTML correctly and uploading the image to a server, but a questionmark still showing up, you have to enable:
Mail > Preferences > Viewing > Display remote images in HTML messages
This comes disabled by default in Mail, might not be good with other people using Mail and having this disabled as they will probably see a question mark too?
The questionmark will still show up in the signature screen, but send it to yourself (as test) and you will see that the image will show up.
October 14th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
I tried altering your signature to create my own since i have limited knowledge of html. (basically just swapping website for website and name for name) All your “how to” info makes sense to me so i didn’t expect any problems except with the image (which i don’t think is on an absolute link), but when i overwrite the file in my signature file and then try to use it, the signature just pops up as the code.
I even tried using your original code to see if it was the adjustments i made to the code, but even your signature pops up as code. Were there recent updates to Mail that might have made this methodology no longer viable?
Any thoughts?
THANKS!
October 14th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Thanks!!! tyler it took a little effort, but a great end result. Your the man!
October 18th, 2009 at 3:49 am
I was able to make it it work. These are the steps that I’ve done based on the procedure above.
1. Create a new Signature from Mail
2. Close the Mail
3. Go to Library | Mail | Signatures
4. Open the new signature.webarchive in Safari.
5. Re-save it using the same filename. It will ask to replace the file - Just accept it.
6. Open the same webarchive file in Text Edit
7. Do required Text Editing/Formatting (Do not insert the pictures yet)
8. Open Mail | Preferences | Signature - Select your signature
9. If you want to add an image just drag and drop the image from Finder to the Signature.
10. Voila!!!! It should work
October 27th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
I was so excited to find this, but I’ve spent a couple hours and can’t get it to work. i THINK the problem is that I’m not able to save it in the “webarchive” format. Could that be it?
I know everything else is correct, but when I open the newly overwritten sig file, there’s just plain nothing there. Nothing in the prefs pane and nothing in the emails using that sig.
Any ideas?
November 11th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Thank you very much, that was REALLY helpful
November 18th, 2009 at 5:41 am
I wonder if it is possible to make a html file signature and than replace images from server by images from my computer. I tried but always when I edit signature in Mail editor - it changes html formating.
For example in windows I create html file with images with attribute src=”file://” . Than this image is being attached to mail - but unfortunately in mac’s Mail it does not work - no attachment is being sent.
thanks
November 24th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Wow thanks for your tips. This is very useful.
November 30th, 2009 at 3:15 am
Hi there,
Link to images. Personally, I dislike it when someone sends an e-mail to me with an attachment that is just their signature image or background file (it makes scanning for other e-mails with legitimate attachments more difficult). Because of this, I recommend linking to your images by placing them on a web server rather than including them as attachments.
How do you do “linking to your images by placing them on a web server” ??? Is there a physical link inside of the mail signature? Also if you are off line - then do these images in your signature still appear?
many thanks
December 28th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
this works great! thank you!
December 29th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Hi Tyler!….
Thank you for the great tutorial!….
Any tutorials, tips or tricks creating HTML signature usign table and css in entourage? seems entourage not friendly enough with tables……
Thanks.
February 4th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Thanks for the HTML signature tutorial! I’m very excited about this!
March 3rd, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Hello, works great until I go to send an email. I get an error message saying: Message refused. Try another server, but nothing on my list works.
March 22nd, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Hi,
I can’t get my images to show up. I’ve loaded them all on the server, and my prefs for composition are already set to rich text.
Any ideas?
April 5th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Exactly what I need. Apple advisers did not mention html/css
Don’t get me wrong, they help more then they hinder — you’d think this would be an option they would know.
May 4th, 2010 at 9:07 am
Worked like a charm!
Thanks, Tyler. Great tut!
May 20th, 2010 at 5:11 am
I followed all the steps and everything looks good until I received the signature I sent to myself, it all became plain text with no images. Any ideas?
June 6th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
I like the way you write. Your style is very smooth and I enjoy reading your posts. I¡¯m headed to the dentist but will be back later
June 8th, 2010 at 9:24 am
Im happy I discovered this blog site, I couldnt get any knowledge on this matter prior to. I also run a niche site and in case you are ever serious in a little bit of visitor writing for me make sure you feel free to let me know, i’m always look for people to check out my weblog. Please stop by and leave a comment sometime!
June 8th, 2010 at 11:31 am
Hey Tyler
Brilliant! Thank you! I have been looking for something like this for ages!!
I am a developer too, I have 5 logos on my signature and the only thin I am concerned about is when people reply to me or forward the email on, there are 7 attached images (but they are all blank) and it looks a bit dodgy!!
Any fixes for that at all??
Guess time will tell….
June 9th, 2010 at 5:45 am
Thanks for this - I have linked to your article in my own blog where I show the easy/dirty way to do this: http://www.haizdesign.com/blog/apple/adding-images-to-your-signature-in-mail/
June 13th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
I think they need to do everything possible to stimulate this area for growth and keep small businesses moving along. They are the life blood of our community.
June 13th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Works like a charm, thanks for that info.
June 15th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
was very pleased to find this site.I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.
June 16th, 2010 at 1:09 am
I’ve just spent the last 5 hours trying to work out exactly the same thing as Emily, I was doing everything right but only the code kept appearing in Safari and then the signature. If this happens, your Text Edit is not saving HTML files correctly and you need to change some settings. Take a look at this article, do what it says, then when your Text Edit is saving files correctly as HTML, it does actually work! Thank god…I was beginning to lose the will to live never mind send an HTML sig.
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_save_html_files_from_textedit.html
June 26th, 2010 at 1:49 am
I’ve used this method very successfully - so thanks. BUT - an apple software update this week has messed this up for me! My embedded email signature now re-formats itself and looks unlike the stylised version saved in the .webarchive format. I’ve tried re-loading the signature but to no avail. Any idea’s?
July 6th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
@Matt - I have the same exact problem since the latest Apple software update. Yes, any ideas would be ideal.
July 10th, 2010 at 12:34 am
Just did these instructions AND worked 100% awesome write up
J’
July 11th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
I tried this and it seemed to work fine, but when I test it, the page comes up blank. It pops up fine when I start the email, but when I email it to myself, there is nothing there. Not sure if it’s due to the version I am using? I’m using version 3.6 on OSX 10.5.8. Any suggestions?
July 12th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
This page was not working this morning. i tried accesing it but it timed out 4-5 times now but i can access it now. Why does this occur? Am i the only one having this issue?
July 15th, 2010 at 2:29 am
Tip:
When saving your new signature into Mails signatures in Library the just click the latest to get the name into the save field!
Cheers
July 15th, 2010 at 8:46 am
Yep - great solution but as RBenditt says, you need to make sure that, in the composing tab, “Rich text” is selected rather than “Plain text”
Might be worth amending the original post to add this?
Thanks anyway - solved some probs for me!
July 15th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Did everything you said but when i create a new email it my signature html shows up as an attachment. i setup the ’signature” settings with the correct html file as the signature but all it does on every new email created is attach the html. instead of inserting it into the email.
any help please email
chrisb@studioccollective.com
July 17th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
This is great, thanks for sharing!
July 27th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Tyler, When I try to save from Safari, I do not get the picture that you post on Point 6. I can’t navigate to signatures and no option to choose web archive. What do I do?
July 29th, 2010 at 2:30 am
Tyler,
I managed to solve the ealier problems I had, I was successful in using your HTML to test on my email and it works, but I can get it to work on my own photo file. Any idea.?