How to add an email signature in Apple Mail (Mac and iPhone)

On a Mac

Open Mail, then Mail in the menu bar, then Settings (or Preferences on older macOS versions), then the Signatures tab.

• Select the account you want the signature on from the left-hand list.
• Click the + button to create a new signature, and give it a name.
• Paste your signature into the main box with Cmd+V.
• Use the 'Choose Signature' dropdown at the bottom to set it as the default for that account, or leave it on 'At Random' / 'In Sequential Order' if you keep more than one.

The setting that breaks pasted signatures

Apple Mail has a checkbox, 'Always match my default message font', enabled by default in the Signatures pane. With it on, Mail discards the fonts, sizes and some formatting from anything you paste in and replaces them with your default compose font.

Turn that checkbox off before pasting a designed signature. It's easy to miss because the signature can still look correct immediately after pasting — the reformatting is more visible in the fonts and sizing than in the layout, so a quick glance doesn't always catch it.

On iPhone and iPad

iOS Mail's built-in signature editor is plain text only — it strips colours, images and formatting entirely, which makes it unsuitable for a designed HTML signature.

To get a formatted signature on iPhone, open the signature in Safari (or another browser) on the device itself and use its 'Copy signature' action, which puts real HTML on the clipboard — then paste that directly into an email you're composing, rather than into Settings.

Mac and iPhone signatures are separate

Apple doesn't sync Mail signatures between a Mac and an iPhone the way it syncs some other settings. Each device needs its own signature set up — expect to repeat the process once per device, not once per account.

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