I recently switched my e-mail service from my own server to Google Apps. I’ll write more about the move (and the reasons behind it) in a separate post but, as a consequence, I’ve also started using the Apple Mail application to access my GMail over IMAP. On the whole, Apple Mail is pretty straightforward but one of the things I couldn’t work out is how to create an HTML signature.

Melvin Rivera has the answer in his post on custom CSS signatures in Mail and the basic gist is to create a dummy signature in the Mail preferences; close Mail; create some custom HTML (with inline CSS to keep GMail happy – Melvin has an example linked from his post); save that as a .webarchive file using Safari; copy the new .webarchive file over the .webarchive file that corresponds to the dummy signature stored in ~/Library/Mail/Signatures (keeping the same filename); fire up Mail and open the preferences; rename the signature if required, then drag it to the mail account(s) with which it should be associated.

(To think that I thought Microsoft Outlook’s options were over-complicated!)

Sadly, neither Apple Mail, nor GMail seem to recognise the tel: links for phone numbers.