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In this blog post, I am going to show you how to set your new email signature up in iMail. Some of you may have already seen our other blog post on setting up your signature in iMail running Mac OSX Leopard or Snow Leopard but if you are running the newest operating system OSX Lion then you will soon realise that things have changed slightly.
So the first thing you will need to do, if not done already, is allow hidden files to be seen in your OS. You can disable this after if you prefer but if you do a lot of web design then it may be ideal to leave it on so that you can view and edits files such as .htaccess. To do this you will need to go to:
Finder>Applications>Utilities>Terminal
Once you have opened this your terminal window should show up and you will need to copy and paste the following command into it:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
You might see all your files from your desktop disappear, but fear not, this is just so the finder can reboot. Once it has done so, you may see files on your desktop you hadn’t seen before such as: .DS_Store – these are crucial to OSX so don’t delete them.
Ok, now you have your hidden files unhidden it’s time to make your signature.
1.In your Mail.app, go to Mail>Preferences>Signatures and click on the ‘+’ sign at the bottom. Name it something to do with your email account and click the close button.
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2.Creating your signature:
Open up Dreamweaver or any html editing platform and create your desired signature. Unlike Leopard, Lion Mail won’t support anything with a doctype, head or body tags, so make sure they are not in there. Be sure to use inline styles and common html such as div, img. p, a etc. As mentioned in our other blog post, be sure to host your images and link them in the source as you won’t be able to see them as attachments in your new signature.
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3. Once you have made your signature and are happy with it, save it and preview it in Safari. Then go to:
File>Save As and save it as a web archive file (.webarchive) – you can name it anything you like for now.
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4. Go to: User>Library>Mail>V2>MailData>Signatures and you will see some files in there with a bunch of random numbers and letters as file names. If you have more than one signature it is hard to know which one is your new blank one you have just created so click on the file and hit space bar and it will show you which one it is in quickview.
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5. Once you have found the right signature file, copy the file name and delete it.
6. Go back to the file you have just saved in Safari and bring it into your signatures folder. Then rename this file to the one you just deleted by selecting it, hitting enter and pasting (CMD V)
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7. Quit your Mail app and restart, then go to Mail>Preferences>Signatures and make sure your new Signature is there and assigned to the account you want it for.
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And were done. If your signature is not showing at all, make sure you have no body, html, head tags in your signature and no doctype and this will keep it from working.
Hopefully this has been helpful, if you want to hide the hidden files again, it’s real simple. Just follow the same step above but paste this code in your terminal instead:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder
Great instructional, I have several own designed sigs I use in apple mail, since Lion I couldn’t find them, thanks to the above I found them, thanks!!
I like your signature design, especially the social media icons, I have tried to add them to my own sigs using your code example, but I’m having trouble with the spacing, the code example cuts off to the right.
Any chance getting the full code example?
Cheers
thanks so much for the great instructional!
Thank you so much for this tutoria.
I have used your example, and It works fine in the Local Admin Account. But I am trying to add a html signature to a Mobile account user. This does not work for any Network or Standard Account. Can you give me a pointer to why this might be. I think there is something going on under the hood – Permissions?
Regards
…on second look, I noticed that I had the Mail Preference for Composing set to “Message Format: Plain Text”. So I changed it to “Rich Text” and all is well now. I hope this will help anyone else that makes this mistake.
Sorry I didn’t get back to you in time Gav but you’re absolutely right, switching it to rich text will solve those issues. Thanks for posting!
Great tutorial but you can skip the terminal step. Instead in finder go to the Go menu and hold the Option (alt) key which will allow you to get in to the Library folder.
Awesome Ian, I’ll remember that for future reference. Thanks for your feedback
Perfect guide ian..
Great, but no matter what I do I can’t fans the MAIL folder in Library. Have tried everything – it’s not there!
Hi Melissa, are you able to locate your Library folder? If so, it is 100% in there –
Library>Mail>V2>MailData>Signatures
Hi. I can get the file into the folder. It shows the images when saved but as soon as it gets into Mail it loses the pictures. Any ideas please?
Thanks