How to Create an Email Signature in Mac Mail (2026 Guide)

To create an email signature in Mac Mail, open Mail and choose Mail > Settings, click Signatures, select your account in the left column, click the Add button below the middle column, name the signature and type it in the right column. Then pick it in the Choose Signature pop-up menu so Mail adds it to every new email from that account, as Apple's Mail User Guide describes.

A signature is the part of an email nobody reads closely until it's wrong: an old phone number, last year's title, a logo that arrives as a mystery attachment. This guide walks through creating one in Mail on macOS 27, making it appear on its own, choosing a different one for each account, adding an image, and the handful of reasons a signature quietly stops showing up.

How to create an email signature in Mac Mail

Mail on a Mac keeps signatures in its own settings pane, and each signature belongs to one or more email accounts. Apple's signature guide gives these steps for Mail on macOS 27:

1. In the Mail app, open the Mail menu and pick Settings (Preferences in older macOS releases).
2. Open the Signatures tab.
3. In the left column, select the email account the signature is for.
4. Click the Add button (the plus sign) below the middle column.
5. Type a name for the signature, such as Work full or Reply short. The name only appears in Mail's Signature pop-up menu, so recipients never see it.
6. Click in the right column and write the signature. Use the Edit menu to paste text, add links and check spelling, and the Format menu for fonts, colors, alignment and lists.

One step trips up almost everyone at least once. If All Signatures is selected in the left column when you click Add, Apple says you have to drag the new signature onto an account before you can use it. A signature that lives only under All Signatures is stored but attached to nothing, so it never shows up in a new email.

You can also drag your own card from the Contacts app into the right column. Apple's Signatures settings page lists that as a way to drop in your contact information without retyping it. I find the result needs tidying, because a contact card often carries more than belongs in a signature, but it's a fast starting point.

How to make a signature appear automatically

Mail adds a signature to every new message once you choose it as the account's default in the Choose Signature pop-up menu. According to Apple's instructions, the setting works per account:

1. Go back to the Signatures tab in Mail's settings.
2. Select an account in the left column.
3. Open the Choose Signature pop-up menu and pick the signature you want added to every message from that account.

If an account has more than one signature, the same menu lets Mail rotate through them, at random or in sequential order. Rotation suits a personal account where the signature carries a quote; on work email, a sign-off that changes from message to message looks unplanned. To stop Mail adding a signature at all, choose None in the menu.

The setting has to be made for each account separately. I keep two signatures on my work account, a full one and a one-line version, and set the full one as the default. When I reply inside a long thread, I switch to the short one by hand, because the person already has my details from the first message.

Add, switch or remove a signature while you write

Every new message window has a Signature pop-up menu. Pick a different signature there and Mail swaps it in; choose None to take the signature out of that one email. When a signature you expect isn't in the menu, Apple's advice is to check that it's assigned to the account in the From field.

Signature above or below the quoted text

The Place signature above quoted text checkbox in the Signatures pane decides where your signature lands in replies and forwards. Selected, it sits right under your reply, above the earlier messages. Cleared, it drops below the whole quoted thread, where hardly anyone will scroll. I leave it selected.

What to put in a professional email signature

A work signature needs to answer one question for the reader: how do I reach this person another way? Name, role, company and one phone number or link cover it. Everything after that competes for attention, and on a phone a long signature can take up more of the screen than the email it closes.

A version I'd copy and adjust:

[Your name]
[Role], [Company name]
555-0142 | [yourcompany].com
[One link: booking page, portfolio or LinkedIn]

[Your name] | [Company name] | 555-0142

A few habits that keep a signature useful:

• Keep the contact details as text. If they live only inside an image, they disappear whenever the image is blocked or the email is plain text.
• One link, not five. A row of social icons tells the reader nothing about which one you actually want them to use.
• Skip the legal disclaimer unless your company requires one. If it does, put it in the full signature only.
• Match your sign-off to the email, not the signature. "Best" or "Thanks" goes above the signature in the body; the signature itself starts with your name. Our guide to ending an email covers which closing lines fit which situation.

When I changed roles, my title was still wrong in the signature on my second Mac for a week, because I'd only updated one machine. That's the argument for keeping signatures syncing, covered below.

How to add a logo or image to a Mac Mail signature

To add a logo to an Apple Mail signature, select the signature in Mail > Settings > Signatures and drag the image file into the right column, where Apple says it becomes part of the signature preview. Resize the image before you drag it in. Apple's guide describes no way to crop or scale it inside Mail, and a logo straight from a brand folder is usually far bigger than a signature needs.

Images only travel in rich text email. Apple's guide to plain and rich text says plain text drops formatting, tables and images, and rich text can include them. If your default format is plain text (Mail > Settings > Composing > Message format), your logo won't go out at all. For a single message, Format > Make Rich Text switches it back.

Even in rich text, Apple warns that depending on the recipient's mail server, your signature may show up as an attachment or image rather than inline. The first time I added a logo, a client replied asking what the attached file was. Since then I send any new signature to my own Gmail and Outlook.com addresses and open both on my phone before I make it the default.

Can you use an HTML signature in Apple Mail?

Apple Mail has no HTML editor for signatures. The Signatures settings give you a rich text box with Edit and Format menus and nothing that shows or accepts code. What you can do is paste formatted content: Apple's guide says the Edit menu handles pasting into the signature preview, so a signature laid out in a web page or a document can be copied and pasted in with much of its formatting.

Apple doesn't document how pasted layouts are handled, so results vary. Keep the design plain (a few lines of text, one link, one small image) and treat any pasted signature as something to try out in a real inbox first.

How to keep a signature's font consistent

Select Always match my default message font in the Signatures pane and Mail uses the font you set in Fonts & Colors settings for the signature, according to Apple's settings page. That's the simplest way to stop a pasted signature from arriving in a different typeface than the email above it.

Leave the checkbox cleared if you want the signature styled separately, say your name in bold or a smaller size for the contact line. Our guide to fonts and text size in Mac Mail covers how to set the default message font in the first place.

Signatures on your other Macs and your iPhone

Mail signatures sync between Macs through iCloud. Apple's Signatures settings page says they sync to other Macs that have iCloud Drive turned on with Mail selected in the iCloud Drive options. Make the change on one Mac and the others pick it up.

An iPhone or iPad doesn't share those signatures. Apple's iPhone User Guide puts the signature in the Settings app under Mail, in the Composing section, where you type a separate one, plain text only. If you want your phone to match, copy the text across by hand and accept that the logo stays on the Mac.

Mac Mail signature not showing? Check these

When a signature doesn't appear in Mac Mail, the cause is almost always a setting rather than a bug. Start at the top row; the first two explain most cases.

The Hide My Email row comes straight from Apple's signature guide, which says messages sent from a Hide My Email address don't get a signature automatically. If you use those addresses for sign-ups and occasional replies, that's usually what you want anyway.

How to edit or delete a signature in Mac Mail

To edit a signature, choose Mail > Settings > Signatures, select the account, click the signature in the middle column and change it in the right column. To delete one, select it and use the Remove button (the minus sign) under the list. Apple's guide notes that removing a signature from All Signatures removes it from every account that uses it, so delete from the account if you only want it gone there.

I review my signatures whenever something on them changes, rather than on a schedule: a new title, a new phone number, a link that now redirects. The edit is quick, and it spares me the slightly awkward reply from a client who called the old number.

If you use signatures as reusable blocks of text beyond your name, such as a standard paragraph you paste into replies, the guide to Apple Mail templates shows how that works alongside Send Again and text replacements.