In a previous post I described how to add a plain text signature to your emails.

That’s fine if you only want a very simple signature.  But what about if you want to put colour, emphasis or links in your signature?  That’s possible too – but it does require a little more work.

A word of caution.  The method I’m about to describe uses HTML, the original code language used for website pages .  Not all users allow HTML to be displayed in their email clients, which would mean that this wouldn’t work for them.  It’s most likely that this will work for 99% of people you send emails to though.

I’m not going to rewrite the steps to add the signature to your account.  Follow the same procedure as described in the other post but replace steps 1 and 2 with:

1. Create a file called (for example) signature.html and save it somewhere on your computer, like in “My Documents”
2. a) If you’re familiar with HTML you can open the file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad) and create the code you want.
   b) Otherwise use a program that creates HTML code for you, (for example OpenOffice.org, KompoZer, Amaya, SeaMonkey) and open signature.html using that.
   c) Format your signature to be how you want it, it could be:

   Regards,
   Joe Bloggs
   
   Please visit my website: www.josephbloggs.co.uk
   
   Here’s another website I’ve found interesting and useful www.freecycle.org.

   Disclaimer: Don’t rely on anything you read in this email!

Save the file, then carry on with the other steps.  You’ll get the above formatted signature in your outgoing emails!

Apart from signature “Add-ons” there’s one other signature type feature in Thunderbird – vCard.  I plan to explain this in a post soon.