How to Make an HTML Signature for Mail in Mac OS X

Many users like to set a signature to be automatically included in their outbound emails, and for those who like to have a stylized and somewhat interactive email signature, they’ll want to create what’s called an HTML signature. An HTML signature allows for different text styling like bolds, italics, font sizes, and, perhaps most relevant to many, the inclusion of things like a phone number or links to websites and social addresses.

For Mac users who would like to create and set an HTML signature, the process is really quite simple in the Mail app of Mac OS. You can actually create however many signatures you want, and even set different signatures for different email accounts. We’ll walk through how to make and set a simple HTML signature in Mail on the Mac.

How to Create and Set an HTML Signature for Mail in Mac OS X

This is the same in all versions of Mail app for Mac OS:

1. From the Mac Mail app, create a new email message – this is simply for the sake of creating the HTML signature and it won’t be sent
2. In the body of the email, type out your desired signature and style it as necessary – bold, font sizes, italics, phone number, links to websites or social profiles, etc (note that typing out links in modern versions of Mail app will automatically turn them into HTML links)
3. Select all of the signature and copy it to your clipboard with Command+C, then discard the email you just made to create the signature



4. Now go to the “Mail” menu and choose “Preferences”
5. Select the “Signatures” tab
6. Choose your email address provider from the left side to set the signature for
7. Click on the [+] plus button to create a signature, give it a name, and in the right-side panel hit Command+V to paste the HTML signature



8. Close the Preferences window and now create a new email message, the HTML signature will automatically appear at the bottom of the email message

The chosen HTML signature will now appear in every new email message that is created or replied to from that Mac, unless specified otherwise.

If you create multiple signatures, you’ll find them available to access and use independently through the “Signature” dropdown menu alongside the Subject field of a mail message.

You can create as many signatures as you want, and you can also create different signatures for different email accounts, the latter of which is particularly good idea if you have multiple email accounts set up on a Mac and you want to keep a personal signature separate from a work signature, for example. Some desktop users also may find the brevity signatures pretending to be an iPhone to be useful, particularly if you’re wrangling many emails on a regular basis (and aren’t we all?).

By the way, now that you’ve created an HTML signature in the Mac Mail app, you can easily transfer and set the HTML signature on the iPhone or iPad too by simply emailing yourself, copying the signature, and pasting it into the appropriate Mail Signature preference section. Do note that setting custom signatures on the iPhone and iPad will replace the default “Sent from my iPhone” signature that appears on emails sent from your mobile device, unless you specifically add that to the signature itself.