Setting Up Your Mac Mail Signatures

Email signatures are easy to set up so that you can have your name and other information automatically displayed at the bottom of any email you compose. You can also add multiple email signatures and assign them to different email accounts. You can set a signature to use as your default, or change your signature each time you compose a new message.

Video Transcript: One of the most basic functions of using a Mail app, like Mac Mail, is to use email signatures. These are little things that appear at the bottom of all the email that you sent. It's really simple to setup email signatures in Mail. All you need to do is go to Mail, Preferences, and then from there click on Signatures. Then you'll get this list here, three columns. This is where it gets a little bit confusing because if you have multiple accounts, like I have an iCloud account and a Goggle account, both are email accounts that I use to send and receive email. I have them listed here and then I have something called All Signatures. 
Creating a single signature that you use everywhere is pretty easy. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to use the plus button and it's going to give it a name like Signature 1. I can change it to whatever I want. So I can call it, say, Main Sig. Then it's going to fill it in with my name and email address. Now this is a text area and I can change this to whatever I want. So, for instance, I might think it's probably unnecessary to have my email address there. If they're getting email from me they can reply to me. So maybe just have my name. Or maybe put my company name there. Or even an URL that they can click on. I like to keep things simple though so I usually have just name and a company name or something like that. Maybe this might be good.
Now that I've got that notice on the left here it says All Signatures, 1 signature. For iCloud it says there's zero and for Goggle there's zero. You can have multiple signatures and you can assign them to each account. So in order to use a signature now I need to assign it to one of these accounts. Let's say I want to assign it to both. I want to use it for both. So I'm going to drag and drop there and drag and drop again. Now you can see I've got on under All Signatures and one under iCloud and one under Goggle. If I select Goggle you see it shows me the same thing for all of these.
Now I'm not done yet because what I want to do is choose a signature I'm going to use for each one of these. So I'm going to select iCloud first. At the bottom here it says Choose Signature and I can choose which one I want. I can choose Main Sig there. I want to do the same thing for Goggle. Now that I've got that setup I can use this. So I can do New Message. My signature is going to be put there automatically and I can start typing above it and it's added.
Now you can get a lot more complex. You can add other signatures. So, for instance, I can create one called Biz Sig and, you know, this is for business email. I can create one called Personal Sig here and maybe this is just going to be my name. I can add these to what I want. So maybe I want both of these to be under iCloud but for Goggle I don't use my business signature there so I'm just going with Personal Sig. Now I can look and see iCloud has got all three. Goggle has just those two. I can change what I want to use. So maybe here I want to make the default my personal signature and under iCloud I want to make the default my business signature.
So what does this do. I've got three under iCloud and two under Goggle. Now when I compose a new message notice that in addition to the signature, the default one, being placed there I can change it. So I can change it here. I have all three available because I'm sending from the iCloud account. So I can change to Personal. I can change to Main. Whatever I want. If I'm going from my gmail account then I only have Personal and Main. So only those two that are there. 
Notice also this gives me the ability to jump right into Editing Signatures again. Also you have some really cool options like I could say, for choosing a signature, instead of choosing one of these as the default, Choose one at Random or Go Through Sequential Order. So the first one then the next one I send is the second one and the next one I send is the third one. Why these? Well, a lot of times people like to put, say, inspirational quotes or something like that in their email. So this way it kind of varies. You can have twenty different signatures of quotes and then say Choose One at Random and stick it there. That's why people use those.
So this is how you do it. If you ever want to edit this, I mean you could go in and say okay under Goggle I don't want to use my main signature there ever. I just want a personal signature. Under iCloud is never want to use personal signature. Do the minus button there. You can see only those two are available. You can have extra signatures under All Signatures that aren't even here and swap them in and out whenever you want. You also can use the default message font or uncheck that. You can actually Copy and Paste styled text from TextEdit or Pages into here to use Bold and colors and things like that. You can also choose to place a signature above any quoted text in reply so you have that option as well.
So I hope this gets you started with using email signatures. At the very least just create one, add it to all of your accounts, and then use that as your main and only signature. It's pretty much what I do. But if you have the need you have all these other options to create all sorts of interesting signatures and use them in all sorts of ways.

Comments: 10 Responses to “Setting Up Your Mac Mail Signatures”

Robin Guldi

5 years ago

Gary
Thanks very helpful, answered all questions.

Robin

Bill Toney

Well done explanation on use of signatures.
How would one go about putting a written signature on the emails - like those you can create using Preview? A quickie tutorial on that process would be a great addition.

Roger

It doesn't look like images can be included in a signature.
For instance, a company logo.

Gary Rosenzweig

Bill: I did a video on including images a while back. But I highly recommend that you don't use images in your signatures. It is a good way to annoy people who receive your messages as it will mean that all of your messages will have this image as an attachment, filling up their inbox with it for each message you send and taking up bandwidth on mobile devices. I know I get annoyed when I get unnecessary email attachments like logos and such in simple emails. Plus, there is a security concern with making your actual written signature so easily available. https://macmost.com/including-images-in-email-signatures.html

Roger: Sure they can. See the link on the previous comment. But I recommend against it.

Jim B. Morris

For my business e-mail, I often answer questions or give instructions. Instead of writing the same info each time, I created several "signatures" that are actually an entire default message that's several paragraphs long. Before sending, I customize the top of the e-mail with a personal greeting to the individual recipient. Do you see any problems with that approach?

Plus, I like Bill Toney's suggestion. Also, please go into more detail on: Always match my default message font. Thanks.

Jim: That's a fine approach. See my reply to Bill above. I think all the match default font option does is to change the font of the signature to match the rest of the message. But experiment and see.

Robin Oram

Gary, I would like to automatically include the date under and as part of my signature, how could I do this?
Thank you, Robin Oram

Robin: There's no way to have a dynamic signature like that. And no need, really, since all email gets a timestamp when you send it anyway.

Shirley

I like to choose None in the Signatures Preference, then I can choose from the new email which one to use.

Comments Closed.

Setting Up Your Mac Mail Signatures

Comments: 10 Responses to “Setting Up Your Mac Mail Signatures”

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