Revolutionize Your Workflow with Mac Mail Change Signature

How to eSign a document: mac mail change signature

hi this is gary with macmost.com today let's take a look at setting up and using email signatures [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you can read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so when you go to send a new email message in the mac mail app usually a signature is included at the bottom right when you start composing a message this could have your name your email address a website all sorts of things but it could be a bit confusing as to how to set up email signatures sometimes they don't appear and sometimes when you create a new email signature you can't seem to select it to use it in a new message so in the mail app when you go to compose a new message probably by default you'll see an email signature that appears at the bottom it'll just be there automatically but you can change which email signature is there by using this little pop-up menu here if you select it you can select none and it will remove the signature you can select from a list of signatures although you may only see one if you haven't set up anymore and you can choose edit signatures instead of using this let's go directly there by going to mail preferences and then selecting signatures at the top and this is where you control the signatures in the mail app using this can be confusing because it works in a different way than just bet anything else in mac os you'll see three columns here on the left you'll see a column that includes all signatures at the top and then under that each email account that you've set up maybe you only have one email account but many people have several added to mac mail so you'll see them all listed here then you'll see alicia's signatures here in the middle and then you can select the signature and see it here on the right and also edit it now what's confusing is if you add a new signature so let's use the plus button here and add another signature it's going to give it a name like this but let's name it something proper let's say this is something we want to use in business communication so we'll call it business and then let's set it up here like we want so maybe i'm going to use my name and a full url here that people can use to visit my site and then maybe before it i'm going to place a bunch of dashes so that it kind of creates a divider line so this is my new business signature so it seems like you're done and you should be able to use this let's go and create a new message here and we'll see it's using the old one okay so the default is set to signature number one not business but that's fine i can change it right here except when i select this i don't see my business signature listed anywhere so what's going on here why can't i select it well if i return to preferences here i'll see the accounts and notice they each say they have one signature all signature says two and it lists both of them but if i go to one of these it only shows signature number one each one of them just shows that that's because of the way this whole signature interface works if you want to use a signature with an email account you have to add it to that email account now you don't need to recreate it all you need to do is go back to all signatures and drag and drop this to any one of these notice now it says two signatures here for this i can select it and there it is but it's not listed for these other ones so if i want to add it for all of these accounts so i can use the signature whenever i'm sending an email from any account i can easily drag and drop it like that so now it's listed for every single one of these accounts i can change the order at which it appears here in the account if i want and also down here set the default for it so for sending an email from this account the default signature number one but i can change that to business so that's the default now let's try sending an email you can see it's choosing my new business email signature and over here it even says it is but i can always go back and choose signature number one both of those are listed under that account so they're both going to be available right here now remember i only set it as the default for this account so if i change where this email is coming from to another account it will choose the default for that account but i added business to every single account so it's always going to be available here in this list so the idea here is that all signatures will show you a list of every signature that you've created but each account will only show the signatures that are available to that account so i can create another one and let's call this one personal and this is just for sending email to friends and all i'm going to do here is just a long dash and then my first name that's all i want for a personal email and i'm going to add this only to my icloud account here so it's not going to be on my imap account or my google account so you can see this one says three signatures and personals included but these do not have personal included at all but i'm still going to leave signature number one as my default for icloud so let's create a new message here i'm going to switch to sending it from my icloud account and you can see it chooses the signature number one as the default but i have personal available personal wouldn't be available if i was using another account here because it's not in the list for that account so you can basically create a new signature with all signatures selected and then use drag and drop to spread it to these other accounts you can even go into one of these other accounts and drag and drop from there so i can drag personal from this account to this account to add it if i want in addition i could also create a new signature while i have an account selected so i'll create a new one here i call this promo if i want to promote something and set it up as something else and then it's available here it'll also be available in all signatures you see it says four signatures now but it's not available in these two accounts unless i'm going to drag and drop it to those accounts and if there's something i want to remove from an account i could go into the account i can select the signature there hit minus and it will do so without even prompting for confirmation because it's only removing it from this account it's still available here and it would still be available in other accounts where i've added that signature it's only in all signatures if i go to select something and then remove it well then i'd be prompted to confirm because that would be removing the signature entirely it would come out of all signatures and not be available anymore in any of these accounts the signature would be gone if you want to rename a signature you can select it and just click on it again and now you're in rename mode just like renaming a file so i can rename this one basic and you'll see that new name is used in the accounts as well i can also select the signature anywhere i am like here i'm under my google account i selected business and i can change this and then i'll see that reflected anywhere the business signature is used so i'll go here select business and you can see the changes are applied there's only one business signature it's just being used by multiple accounts another option you've got is down here under the defaults instead of setting a specific default you can of course choose none or you can choose at random or in sequential order this is useful if you have a bunch of signatures say that have quotes or maybe that promote a different aspect of your business then you could have those signatures listed here for this one account you set it to at random or in sequential order and every time you send a new email message from that account it's going to pick a different one from the list now as for editing your signatures when you select one and go over here to edit you can use just about anything you would normally use for editing rich text so think about how you would edit text in textedit for instance i can select some text and do command b for bold i can also go to the format menu which is unusual because typically when you go to a preferences window like this in an app you can't really do much with the menu items up here but in this case you can you can use format you can do show fonts you can bring up all the fonts change the font the font size the style you could go and choose colors and change the colors here you can do things like bullet lists and choose from all the different style functions you can choose alignment so i can center that and all of that as long as you're sending a rich text email all of that will work of course if you're sending plain text email then that's just going to be converted to plain text as will anything else you do in the message you could also copy and paste text from apps like pages and text edit into here and the styling will be retained you can even copy and paste images in here and include an image in your signature although i strongly advise against that when you put an image with your signature you're attaching a large file to every email message that uses that signature so imagine emailing friends and every single message you send is going to include this attachment for one thing it's going to use up their mobile bandwidth when they read their email on their iphones and also it's going to take up all that extra storage space if you send a friend a hundred messages over the course of a year that's a hundred copies of that image that is now permanently stored inside of their email database so always advise that it's a best practice to keep your email signature short and to the point maybe include your name and your company name if it's business maybe include a link somewhere there's really no need to ever include your email address because you've just sent somebody an email they could just reply or look at who the email is from so when creating email signatures i believe it's important to be very conservative and make them as short and simple as possible and remember when composing a message you can always choose from any that are linked to that account so think about that when you send an email think about what email signature there is at the bottom and does it fit the message so one minute you may be emailing a client or a co-worker with a business message and the next minute you may be emailing a friend with a personal message rarely does the same signature apply in those cases so go and choose your signature carefully don't just use the default for everything and also keep in mind that the signature just paste text at the bottom of the message you can customize it after the fact so i could change the signature here to business but then i could further customize with something else like maybe adding a phone number if i think it's important in this particular situation but i don't necessarily need to add that as a regular email signature that available in the list the recipient isn't going to know the difference between this being something that's an email signature in the app and something that you just typed out so that's how to use email signatures in the mac mail app hope you found this useful thanks for watching [Music] if you like this video click the thumbs up button below to let me know i publish new tutorials each weekday hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out