I installed Snow Leopard this morning and quickly set it up to work with my Microsoft work email account. Mail.app in Snow Leopard finally has Exchange support (it uses the public Exchange APIs which I’m surprised Thunderbird/others haven’t implemented support for yet). I quickly ran into a blocker.

Fonts.

I’m very particular on the fonts my emails use and I like to change it from time to time. Mail.app has this annoying property where you can only set the font as it displays on your screen but your recipients will get to see whatever font their email client picks. By default, Outlook 2007 on all my Windows machines picks this big, ugly Times New Roman font which I absolutely detested. However, actually getting Mail.app to set a font on your email proved to be quite hard and even in the end, I have a klutzy hack.

To compose using your font of choice, here’s what you do.

  1. Open Mail.app. Go to Preferences -> Signatures and create a new signature and associate it with your chosen account (my Microsoft Exchange account in my case). The actual content of the signature doesn’t matter as we’ll be replacing it later.

  2. In Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/Signatures. You should see a file of the form ’<guid>.webarchive’. Make a mental note of this file’s name. If you already have a signature, you’ll see several files here in which case, open up each in Safari until you find the one you created in Step 1. For example, in my case I see F665C5B9-4F7F-48EF-9693-FE1F5BCC3767.webarchive.

  3. Open up your text editor of choice. Type in the following content. You’ll want to replace my name and font with yours of course. Mail editors are finicky about the HTML subset they support and the following, while not exactly CSS best practices, seems to work across all the clients I tried.

     <div>
 <font face="Arial" style="font-size:10pt">
 Your content here
 <br/>
 <br/>
 Sriram
 </font>
 </div>

  4. Save the above file to the desktop as test.html or some other name of your choice.

  5. Apple Mail signatures need to be in the Webarchive format. Thankfully - we have a handy dandy converter built in - Safari. Using Safari, open the file you saved in Step 4. Go to File->’Save As…’ and make sure the format is set to ‘Web Archive’. Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/Signatures and replace the file we found in Step 2. Essentially, we want to change the contents of the signature without having to go through the trouble of making Mail.app recognize a new signature.

  6. Restart Mail.app in case it was open until this point. This is necessary since it seems to cache signatures after it has opened them once.

  7. When you compose or reply to a new mail, you should see the contents from step 3. Replace Your content here with, well, whatever content you intended to write.To make sure the content falls under the font style we created, I start typing between that line and my name and remove the placeholder line when I’m done. I generally don’t have my name at the end of my work mails but in this case, it acts as a nice placeholder for me to know when the signature ends.

It’s a bit painful to have to do this everytime and perhaps there is an Automator script which can do it for me. An alternative is to create your own stationery which does the same thing but that didn’t work for me as not only do you have to pick stationery with every new mail, you also can’t use it on replies or forwards.


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