This was such a pain I decided I should share it.

  1. Important: Close Mail
  2. Create your signature, using raw html tags, in a text-editing program, like TextEdit (which comes pre-installed on every Mac) or TextMate (my favorite). If you can’t do this step, then you’re going to need to read up on some basic html. In general the only tags you’re likely to need for a signature are:
    <br> = line break
    <p> = start a paragraph
    </p> = end a paragraph
    <a href="http://whateverwebaddress.com"> = start link
    <img src="http://imageaddress.com"> = insert an image
    </a> = end link
  3. Save your signature to your desktop as whatever.htm
  4. Drag the whatever.htm file you just created from your desktop onto the Safari icon. The file will open in Safari. Don’t worry about the font but at this point the images and links and line breaks should all be the way you want or you should go back to step 2 and experiment further.
  5. If you want to preview what your signature will look like in Mail, in Safari you can click on File/Mail Contents of This Page/ and you’ll get an email with the signature in it. However, don’t be fooled… you’re not done.
  6. In Safari
    • click on File/Save As…
    • check to be sure the file format pulldown at the bottom of the dialog window is set to Web Archive
    • navigate to your /Library/Mail/Signatures/ folder
    • click on the webarchive file that you’d like to replace with your new signature
    • save and replace the file.
  7. To see if it all worked correctly, open Mail and create a new mail message. You may need to reassociate your signature with the account, but it should work fine.