In Apple Mail, I’ve inserted a JPG image of my company’s logo into my signature. But sometimes when I send email, this image shows up as an attached file, which confuses the recipient because they start looking for an attachment. In reality, there is no attachment...it’s just my company logo, which I want to appear embedded within the body of my message. Is there any way to do this?

What you’re trying to do is get your signature’s image to show up as an “inline image,” which means that it shows up embedded within your message right where you want it to appear, as opposed to showing up as an extra attachment which needs to be downloaded separately.

The way that your recipient sees your signature’s image is dependent on their email client. If your recipient uses Apple Mail, they’ll see your signature’s image displayed properly on their end. But if they’re using most other email clients, they won’t.

Installing Attachment Tamer will automatically fix the problem of images in signatures not appearing inline properly. But as you can see from this screenshot, Attachment Tamer offers many other features as well.

In order for your signature’s image to show up properly as an embedded image for all of your recipients (regardless of email client), your outgoing message must be sent in “rich text” format. However, Mail only sends messages in rich text format under certain predefined circumstances. One of those circumstances is if you haven’t added any extra attachments to your message and you’ve manually overridden the default text formatting (i.e., font, size, style, color) within the body of your email message. So a quick yet impractical fix for your problem would be to go ahead and bold or italicize a few words within the text of your email message every time you send a message, and make sure that you haven’t added any other attachments to your message.

A smarter and easier long-term fix is to install Attachment Tamer ($15, lokiware.info), which fixes this problem by automatically sending all of your email in rich text format. Plus, Attachment Tamer offers dozens of other useful features for handling attachments, such as always displaying an attachment’s long file name and controlling which attachments should show up as icons.

GOT A TECH QUESTION OR A HELPFUL TIP TO SHARE?

Email ask@maclife.com or write to Mac|Life, 
4000 Shoreline Ct, Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080