How to change/customize mail signature in Mountain Lion?

Question

To add an custom mail-signature in Lion you had to add an signature via preferences, and then replace the contents of the webarchive with your own.

In Mountain Lion, Apple replaced the webarchive format for signatures with an new format: .mailsignature. When I open such an file, I just see HTML (!). But when I change it, it doesn't take effect..

Does someone have an solution to perform this?

Answer 1

Quit Mail, edit the .mailsignature file with a text editor changing the HTML to whatever you like then right click the file in Finder and select "Get Info" then tick the "Locked" checkbox. This prevents Mail from resetting the file to the original version and it uses your version.

Answer 2

• open Mail
• create a new signature
• open this folder /Users/you/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Signatures/ • open the latest *.mailsignature file with a text editor
• replace everything under this code with your custom html (replace iso-8859-1 with utf-8 for umlaut support)

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html;
    charset=iso-8859-1
Message-Id: <DDFB0C4D-5555-475C-9B54-115039EF5FE0@Speedport_W_722V_Typ_B>
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 6.0 \(1486\))

• save the file and open the Get Info Dialogue and check Locked, so that it doesn't get overwritten by Mail

Answer 3

I wrote a Ruby script to batch convert .webarchive to .mailsignature files: https://github.com/paulschreiber/misc/blob/master/ruby/webarchive2mailsignature.rb