Email signature generator › iPhone

How to get an HTML signature on iPhone

iOS Mail gives you a plain box for your signature and no way to enter HTML. There is exactly one method that produces a formatted signature, and it hinges on one small step people skip.

Why there is no proper way

On the iPhone, Settings → Apps → Mail → Signature gives you a text field. It accepts rich text if rich text arrives on the clipboard, but there is no source view and no file import. Everything below is a workaround for that.

The method

1. On the iPhone, open your signature in Safari. Not in an app that renders a preview — an actual web page.
2. Select the whole signature. Tap and hold, then drag the handles to cover it completely, including the last line.
3. Copy.
4. Go to Settings → Apps → Mail → Signature, tap into the field, clear it, then tap and hold and choose Paste.
5. Now the step that decides everything: shake the phone and choose Undo. Once, not twice.

What the shake does

iOS pastes the content and then, as a separate action, strips the formatting to match the field's plain style. Undo reverses that second action and leaves the paste in place. It looks like a superstition and it is not: you are undoing the de-formatting step, not the paste.

If you undo twice you remove the paste as well and end up with an empty field. If the signature comes out plain, you either did not undo or you undid too much.

What survives

Text styling, colour, links and small hosted images survive. Table layout mostly survives but can lose column widths. Anything depending on CSS classes is gone — the clipboard carries computed inline styles only.

Keep the phone signature shorter than the desktop one. A three-line signature that reads well on a narrow screen beats a full desktop block that wraps into a mess, and most people read your mail on a phone too.

Per-account signatures

At the top of the Signature screen there is a choice between All Accounts and Per Account. Switching to Per Account gives you a separate field for each mailbox, which is the only way to have a work signature and a personal one on the same phone.

Why the phone signature should be different, not smaller

The instinct is to take the desktop signature and shrink it. That produces a block of tiny text that wraps at awkward points and still occupies a third of the screen under a two-line reply.

A phone signature is a different object. On a phone the reader is almost certainly someone you have already been talking to, because phone replies happen inside threads. They do not need your company address; they need to be able to call you. Name, role, one tappable number. That is the whole design, and it looks deliberate rather than truncated.

Making the number tappable, properly

iOS detects things that look like phone numbers and turns them into links automatically, but the detection is not reliable for international formats written with spaces, dots or brackets. Writing the number as an explicit link in the signature HTML before you copy it removes the guesswork: <a href="tel:+41791234567">+41 79 123 45 67</a>. The visible text can be formatted for humans; the href is what the phone dials.

The same applies to the email address, where a mailto: link is worth having, and to a booking link, which should be a real link rather than a bare URL in text.

What happens on a reply

iOS Mail places the signature immediately after your reply text and above the quoted message, which is the right place. It does not offer a separate signature for replies, so whatever you set appears every time. On a long thread that is several copies — another argument for three short lines.

If the paste keeps failing

Some pages resist selection on iOS because of how they handle touch events. If you cannot get a clean selection of the whole signature, email the signature to yourself from a desktop client, open that message on the phone, and copy from the message body instead. The clipboard behaves the same way and the selection is usually easier.

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