Mac How-to: Adding a Skype Me Button to your signature file in Apple Mail

By Lenn Pryor on October 6, 2005 in Sharing Tools News.

As one of Skype’s resident Mac heads, it is my duty to share the little tips and tricks that we uncover in our own quest to have the ultimate Skype on Mac experience. With the launch of our new Skype Me buttons and the coming launch of SkypeWeb (you can show your Skype online status in near real-time on your blog or email) I wanted to share a few tricks to adding Skype Me buttons to your email signature in Mac OS X 10.4’s Mail application. I love Mail.app because it is simple, has an elegant UI, and most importantly supports Apple’s Spotlight technology which gives you instant search results across your email almost instantly. Its like having Google in your inbox.

It turns out that Mail.app’s signature editor isn’t all that HTML friendly and just pasting in HTML to the signature editor will not achieve the desired effect, in fact it will just plain not work. Here is a quick crash course to get you up an running with a Skype Me button in your signature in Apple Mail so your friends can Skype you back instead of replying in email. The following steps require a little tech savvy, but if you follow the steps below you will be up an running in minutes with a Skype Me button in your sig file.

* Attention Mac Geeks * The good folks over at Mac OS X Hints have documented the process for hacking your signature file to add HTML of any kind. If you are comfortable with DIY modification of your sig file, have a look here. Warning … geeky stuff to follow. Start here and follow the process outlined and skip the long explanation below:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050706181449478

For those who want a little more step by step advice, follow me …

Open the “Preferences” pane for Mail under the “Mail” menu in the upper left hand corner of your screen.
In the “Preferences” pane click the “Signatures” icon and either select your existing email signature or create a new one. Include the details that you would like every email to have automatically when you send such as your contact information, links to your Web site or blog, etc., company privacy statements or other disclaimers if needed, all that fun stuff.
Close the “Preferences” pane to save the signature. Quit Mail. This will generate a “Web Archive” file that contains your signature that is stored in your Mail preferences in your “Home” folder in Mac OS X.
Open a “Finder” window and navigate to your “Home” folder which will be represented as a little house icon with your user account name next to it in the left hand pane of the finder. From there open the “Library” folder, then “Mail”, then “Signatures”. In the “Signatures” folder you will find a file with a long name starting with 3 numbers and ending with “.webarchive”. You need to open this file with an HTML friendly text editor such as BBEdit. Note - Apple’s “TextEdit” application does not work for editing a Web Archive, it actually will render the HTML and not allow you to edit the source. When you have the HTML source in front of you, you are ready to add the Skype Me button’s code to your signature file.

Pick the Skype Me button you want to include in your email. You can choose one of the simpler ones we have prepared for you in advance, or go to the advanced wizard and pick your own combo of functions, text, and graphics. The Skype Me button wizard will automatically generate the HTML and links to show the graphics and add your Skype name. Make sure you select “Email ready HTML” from the code pane on the right side of the page before you copy the code. Make a Skype Me button here:
http://www.skype.com/go/skypebuttons
Paste the email ready HTML from the Skype Me button wizard into your open signature file HTML in the HTML-friendly text editor of your choice in the spot you want it to appear in your signature file.
Save the file as Signature.HTML file on your desktop.
Launch Apple’s Safari Web browser. Select “Open File” from the “File” menu for Safari and select the Signature.HTML file from the desktop. You should see your signature file rendered in Safari with your new Skype Me button. If you are unhappy with the layout or want to make changes, go back to your HTML editor and edit the source as needed.
Save the open Signature.HTML file as a WebArchive from Safari. To do this select “Save As …” from the “File” menu in Safari. You need to rename the file from Signature.HTML to be the same name as your current signature file that is saved in “Home/Library/Mail/Signatures”. The quickest way to accurately rename it is to navigate to the file using the file browser in the “Save As …” Dialogue and select the greyed out file. This will replace the Signature.HTML filename with the name of your active signature. Make sure that the “Format” drop down menu is set to “Web Archive” and save it to “Home/Library/Mail/Signatures”. When you are asked if you want to replace the file of this name with this new one, select yes.
Run Apple Mail now. Go back to the “Preferences” pane as before. Chose the “Signatures” icon. You should now see your new signature file complete with the Skype Me button in the pane. If you see a broken image icon, you may not be online. Select the new signature and apply it to your account(s).
Send a test mail to yourself. You should see the signature with the Skype Me button in the email compose window. Send the test message to yourself and you should see your Skype Me button in the received mail. For some unknown reason Mail might not show the image in compose window the first time and will display a broken image icon and text. Once you send a test message and receive it the image should render and cache from then on.

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Comments

Hi Iam Exiting About this
Where is Link for this
Its good for me...

The "custom button" failed but otherwise this worked exactly as you said !

This article is fine - but who and how do I communicate with Skype - I have a question to Skype -I´d like to change my skype-name - how?

Excellent! I have just added a Skype button to my signature in Mail on my Mac OS X 10.4.2 and everything works perfectly fine. Thanks for antoher great tool! Let's get Skype rolling!

tele1943 - it is not possible to change your Skype name (the one you use to log in). Only possibility is to create new account and then add all your existing contacts there. It's tedious and annoying but that's the way it is. If you want to change the name that other people see in their contact list then just edit your profile.

Hello, it's great and many thanks ! But we have to compose the message in RTF format,isnt it ?

Hi. Thanks for this information. I get the icon perfectly in my email, but when I click on it I get this error message: Mail was unable to open the URL “skype:chrisbreslin?call”. No associated application could be found. Any advice on how I can fix it? Thanks.

Worked like a charm. Do you know on how to do it with Entourage as well? I tried pasting the signature html to my Yahoo Mail but it doesn't work.

im using entourage, hope they can imcorporate it as well.

Does this work in my Gmail signature? All I see is html code. Can anyone help?

does anyone know how to do this in Entourage?

Have I missed something? How do you set this up correctly in MS Outlook 2003 on a MS WinXP based machine? I have tried adjusting a HTM file using MS Word as the editor from... Tools/Options/Mail Format/Signature
All I get is HTML code in my signature

It works! I just added the Skype button to my EMail signature on my MAC OS 10.4.2. The marketing machine goes on.

It does not work on me. Skype button shows up but does not link to generate Skype.
Are you suppose to replace the whole webarchive codes with the ones from Skype email HTML?

I don't ave a signature folder but just this : Signatures.plist
and I can not open it. What am I supposed to do?
thanks

I have tried exactly as you have set out but cannot get a clean button into Mail. I have OS 10.4 (Tiger) The button and signature appear in Safari when I open Signature.HTML but there are 3 short lines of HTML which do not go away. Can you please advise - I have tried both buttons without success. Many thanks

What about entourage, anyone have any ideas, must be as simple as mail. Where is our Mac geek? to the rescue..... Thanks

I don't have file starting with 3 numbers in Home. I only have either 2 digits and alphabet..... Is there any other easier way to do this?

Can someone who got this working share the html that they put in to bbedit that did the trick. I created the file with bbedit, but there was a bunch of extra chacters that were added. Granted I am not an html pro or a wiz with bbedit. I was able to get the signature to render properly in safari after guessing which stuff to remove from the signature.html file, complete with little graphic of the skype button. However like chrisbreslin the button did not launch in to skype, just has safari opening an error page with the following message:

Safari can’t open the specified address.
Safari can’t open “skype:kencameron1971?call” because Mac OS X doesn’t recognize Internet addresses starting with “skype:”.

Also when I added the signature to Mail the button graphic would not render, and was completely missing from the test email I sent my self.

I would post the code that I used in the bbedit file but it will not show up in the source format when used in this web interface. The interface wants to render the html.

Can some one post their working code else where and link to it from their responce?

Thanks in advance.

To all that use MS Outlook. This is how to get a skype button in your e-mail. Go first to the wizard and create the button you want. Then,in the box, right click and copy. Then open NotePad, it is best to have NotePad open and minimized to the taskbar before you start because it get you easy acsess. Ok, open NotePad and choose edit and paste or just right click and paste. Now comes the important thing that get the button to show up. After you have paste, choose File and Save as. Now you must give the button a name to be able to create a html document, so in the File name, call the button f. eks. Big Blue.html The extension must be html or you will not be able to create a html document, then click Save. It usually gets saved in My documents. Now you can go to your e-mail editor. Go to signatur and click on new and then click on use this file as a template. Now you can browse through your documents to find the html document you created. Just be sure that you switch from Plain text to HTML. If Plain text is switched on you will not see the HTML document in the folder you choosed to save it in. So, make sure the editor is in HTML mode. When you find the html document click ok, you should no be able to see the button in the box. Click ok, and remember to choose the button for outgoing and incoming mail. That´s it, folks. Hope this will work for someone.

i thought this was a free service

This doesn't work. Mac OSX/Mac OSX version of Skype does not recognise skype: but will fire up skype if you use callto:. The problem with that is that in Windows, callto: fires up NetMeeting, not Skype. Does anyone have any bright ideas to enable a signature to work across both major platforms?

What about us on MAC 10.3???

this is not about this article but i have been trying to get an answer for weeks, i have what is called "sure call" what is that and how do i get rid of it

For Thunderbird users that struggle like I did:
Create the button with the wizzard, then compose new mail and select insert and HTML, a new window opens, paste the normal HTML from the wizzard into this window and OK. Now the button appears in the new mail. Save this mail with save file as... and choose file. Name it .html Now follow the rest of the procedure of how to attach a signature and use this file instead.

Is this a trick only available with OS X 10.4 and higher? 'Cos in 10.3.9, which I have, it doesn't work. I don't have the .webarchive file in my Mail Preferences file. Can someone please help? I'm going mad!

Hi everyone, for those who found it worked but they get extra text I finally figured it doesn't matter because you can take it off in Mail Preferences, just take off extra text from your signature!

Does anyone know how to add a skype me button to a homepage created with Apple's new iWeb app and posted to .mac? I have tried using the obvious approaches of insert text, insert file etc. but no success.

Ok, but as I use Entourage as my e-mail programme... how do I do it there?

There are many references above to 'can you add the call me button' in Entourage. Has anybody workrd it out yet?

I'm trying to add a Skype me button to my Gmail account. Can anyone help?

I give up...I tried following the directions three times and everytime the image icon was broken. And yes, I'm online.

I am very eager to have a 'skype me' in my signature but .......
so far no way to find the option to implement the skype me buton in mail for Mac OS 3.9. Anybody any idea?

Could you give me the file modified cause,i'm failed to modified the code html.....

It seems to work but the balloon button is always saying im not telling if i'm online even though my privacy is wide open and the button button is always saying i'm online whether I am logged in or not. Also when you insert the signature and open a new email the link for the image is missing, just a question mark. Does this guy know what the hell he is talking about? 'Mac Tech Head'? You are having a laugh aren't you.
I must admit the Mac support from Skype is absolutely crap. What is wrong you with you?

I have tried this over and over.
I get my signature + call me button and a lot of nonsense in the signature.
Can't delete the nonsense.
Do I do something wrong with the BBEdit programme (try-out version)?
Any other way to do it?

how do you add skype button to Entourage?

i have the Mac OS X Version 10.4.8 and a Gmail account. I tried pasting the code onto my signaturehtml in BBEdit but when i open the saved file in safari i only see the code and not the icon. i do not know how to proceed, what am i doing wrong?

i use only Entourage. how can i use this skype button on it ? thank you

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Mac How-to: Adding a Skype Me Button to your signature file in Apple Mail

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