Mac Treat #184: Create Ultra-Compatible Mail Signatures
Recently my husband became aware of a minor quirk related to Apple Mail and how its sent messages may render in other programs (such as Microsoft Outlook).
For business emails, many of us utilize Signatures in Mail to give us a professional signature at the bottom. However, he discovered (via a recipient of one of his emails) that his signature didn’t look quite as he intended on the other end: the fonts rendered much larger and thus, didn’t have the professional feel he was going for.
It turns out that Apple uses WebKit in Mail that Outlook for Windows doesn’t seem to like, and thus, enlarges the font dramatically.
If you use Mail for business email and you send to largely PC-based clients, you may want to consider this solution:
- Make a signature in Mail and save
- Close Mail
- In Finder, under the Go menu, press Option and navigate to [Your User Library] > Mail > V2 > Mail Data > Signatures*
- Open webarchive signature file in Text Edit (or HTML editor)
- Make it how you want it and save (you will be asked if you want to overwrite—say yes)
Then open Mail again and your ultra-compatible signature will be intact. (If you have a willing test recipient using Outlook on a PC, send it out and verify that it looks the way you intended.) Note that a drawback of this is that you won’t be able to use an image in your signature.