How to Set Up Your Email Signature: Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Zoho, and Superhuman

Designing an email signature is the fun part. It takes twenty minutes with any of the free generators, and you end up with something that looks good.

Then comes the part nobody writes about: actually installing it. And installing it is not one task. It is one task per client, per account, per device — each with a different menu path, each stored in a different place, and none of them talking to each other.

If you use Outlook on a work laptop, Outlook on your phone, and occasionally webmail, that is three separate installations of the same signature. Get one wrong and a third of your outgoing email is inconsistent.

This guide gives current, verified steps for each major client, then explains why this process is as tedious as it is.

Before you start: have your signature's HTML available, not just a picture of it. Most generators offer a "copy HTML" or "copy to clipboard" option. Copying a rendered preview from a web page usually works, but copying raw HTML into a rich-text field does not — it will paste as visible code. Know which one you have.

Gmail (web)

The most straightforward of the lot.

1. Open Gmail in a browser and click the gear icon at the top right.
2. Click See all settings.
3. Stay on the General tab and scroll down to Signature.
4. Click Create new, name it, and click Create.
5. Paste your signature into the editor box.
6. Below the editor, set Signature defaults — one dropdown for new emails, one for replies and forwards. These are separate, and leaving the second unset is why signatures often vanish in replies.
7. Scroll to the bottom and click Save Changes. This is at the very bottom of a long page and is the single most commonly missed step.

Notes for Gmail:

• To paste HTML, open the generator's preview in a browser, select the rendered signature, copy, and paste. Gmail's editor accepts rich content but not raw HTML source.
• Gmail places the signature below quoted text in replies by default. There's a checkbox to insert it before quoted text — most people prefer that on.
• Google Workspace admins can push a company-wide footer via the Admin console, but it appends at the bottom of the message rather than at the end of your composed text, which is not the same thing as a real signature.

Outlook — and this is where it gets complicated

"Outlook" has not been one product for some time. Microsoft now maintains separate signature settings for new Outlook on Windows, classic Outlook on Windows, Outlook on the web, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook mobile — and they do not all share data.

The critical thing to understand: classic Outlook stores signatures as local files on your PC, while new Outlook and Outlook on the web store them in the cloud, roamed with your Microsoft 365 account. There is no local Signatures folder in new Outlook. This is why a signature you built in classic doesn't appear when you switch — they live in different places entirely.

Microsoft also redesigned the signature settings page in new Outlook in November 2025, which is why a lot of older tutorials no longer match what's on screen.

Which one do you have?

If your Outlook has a toggle labelled "New Outlook" in the top-right corner, you have both available and the toggle tells you which you're in. If there's no toggle and the interface has the traditional ribbon, you're on classic.

For context on timelines: classic Outlook is currently supported through 2029, with the full switchover to new Outlook scheduled for March 2027 — a date that has already slipped once from an earlier target.

New Outlook for Windows

1. Click the gear icon (Settings) at the top right.
2. Go to Accounts → Signatures.
3. Create or edit your signature and paste it in.
4. Set the defaults for new messages and for replies/forwards.
5. Click Save.

If Save appears greyed out or the change doesn't take, it's usually a sync issue — signatures here are cloud-roamed, so a flaky connection can silently drop the update. Close and reopen Outlook and try again. Editing the same signature in Outlook on the web is a reliable fallback.

Classic Outlook for Windows

1. Go to File → Options → Mail.
2. Click the Signatures button.
3. Click New, name it, and paste your signature into the Edit signature box.
4. On the right, set the signature for New messages and for Replies/forwards separately.
5. Click OK.

The local files live at %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Signatures\ — paste that into File Explorer's address bar. You'll find a .htm, .rtf, and .txt file per signature, plus a folder of embedded images. You can back these up or edit the .htm directly.

Important: insert images using the Insert Picture button rather than pasting them from a browser. Pasting frequently leaves a reference to a file path or an external URL, which is the leading cause of broken logos on the recipient's end.

Migrating from classic to new Outlook

They don't sync, so you have to move it manually. Open your signature in classic, select everything in the Edit signature box, copy it, then paste into new Outlook under Settings → Accounts → Signatures.

A note on roaming signatures

Classic Outlook gained a "roaming signatures" feature in version 2303 and later, syncing signatures across devices via your Microsoft 365 mailbox. In practice it is a common source of confusion, because classic Outlook reads from the local file system and doesn't fetch roaming data the same way new Outlook does — so in a mixed environment where some users are on classic and some on new, results are inconsistent. Sync delays of hours are also reported.

If you're mid-migration and signatures are behaving strangely, the pragmatic advice from several practitioners is to pick one client per user and standardise, rather than letting people bounce between the two.

Outlook on the web

1. Click the gear icon.
2. Go to Mail → Compose and reply.
3. Edit your signature, set the defaults, and Save.

Outlook for Mac

Signatures roam with your account here, so they follow you when you sign in on another Mac.

1. Outlook menu → Settings → Signatures.
2. Click + to add one, paste, and name it.
3. Assign it per account using the Choose default signature dropdowns.

Outlook mobile (iOS and Android)

Completely separate settings, and the step most often skipped.

1. Tap your profile icon at the top left.
2. Tap the gear icon.
3. Tap Signature.
4. If you have more than one account, turn on Per Account Signature and set each individually.

Mobile Outlook doesn't handle full HTML signatures well. Most people use a simplified text-only version here. That's a reasonable compromise — but it does mean your mobile emails look different from your desktop ones, which is exactly the inconsistency this whole exercise is meant to prevent.

Apple Mail (macOS)

1. Open Mail and go to Mail → Settings (older versions: Preferences).
2. Click the Signatures tab.
3. In the left column, select the account the signature belongs to. If you select "All Signatures" instead, you'll create it without attaching it to anything.
4. Click + to create a signature and name it.
5. Paste your signature into the right-hand panel.
6. Uncheck "Always match my default message font." If you leave this checked, Apple Mail strips your formatting. This one checkbox is responsible for a large share of "my signature lost its styling in Apple Mail" complaints.
7. Drag the signature from the middle column onto the account in the left column to assign it.
8. Use the Choose Signature dropdown at the bottom to set the default.

The HTML workaround. Apple Mail's signature editor doesn't accept raw HTML. The reliable method: paste the rendered signature in, save it, quit Mail, then edit the generated .mailsignature file directly. These live at:

~/Library/Mail/V10/MailData/Signatures/

The V10 may be a different number depending on your macOS version — check what's actually in ~/Library/Mail/. You may also need to lock the file (Get Info → Locked) to stop Mail overwriting your edit on next launch.

This is genuinely fiddly, and if it sounds like too much, it is. It's a good illustration of how far the manual route can go.

Apple Mail (iOS)

1. Settings → Apps → Mail (on older iOS: Settings → Mail).
2. Scroll to Signature.
3. Choose All Accounts or Per Account.
4. Type or paste your signature.

iOS Mail's signature field is plain text with very limited formatting. There is no practical way to install a full HTML signature here. Most people use a short text version. This is also where you replace the default "Sent from my iPhone."

Zoho Mail

Popular with Indian businesses, and reasonably clean to configure.

1. Log in at mail.zoho.com.
2. Click the Settings icon at the top right.
3. Go to Signatures.
4. Click the + icon to create a new signature. Give it a name.
5. Enter and format your signature. You can insert images including logos, paste copied images, and hyperlink them.
6. Associate the signature with a From address. This is a required step — use the Associate Mail Address option while creating it, or the + icon on an existing signature. Without this, the signature won't appear automatically when you compose.
7. Click Save.

Zoho notes:

• Zoho supports rich text signatures, and you can insert formatted HTML through the editor.
• Formatting, images, and hyperlinks won't display if you compose in plain text format.
• Multiple signatures are supported and can be customised per email address or alias.

Zoho Mail mobile app

The mobile app doesn't inherit the desktop signature automatically. Set it up on the web first, then in the app go to Settings → select your account under User Accounts → enable "Use Desktop signature", and run a manual sync.

Zoho at the organisation level

Worth knowing before you plan a rollout: administrators have historically found organisation-wide signature management in Zoho more limited than the equivalent in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and community threads report gaps in available placeholder fields on some plans. Check what your specific plan supports before assuming you can push signatures centrally.

Superhuman Mail

A naming note first, because it causes confusion: Superhuman was acquired by Grammarly in July 2025, and in October 2025 the parent company renamed itself Superhuman. The email client is now Superhuman Mail, sitting alongside Grammarly, Coda (now Superhuman Docs), and Superhuman Go in a combined suite. Access to email features now requires a business-tier subscription rather than the previous standalone email plan.

To set your signature:

1. Press Cmd+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows) to open the command palette.
2. Type Signature and select Set Signature.
3. Alternatively, go to Settings → Signature.
4. Paste your signature into the editor.
5. Set separate signatures for new emails and replies if wanted.

Superhuman Mail handles pasted rich content better than most native clients, and generally preserves formatting from a rendered copy. Because it sits on top of Gmail or Outlook accounts, note that its signature settings are its own — setting a signature in Gmail's web settings does not set it in Superhuman Mail. This trips people up constantly.

Why this is so tedious

Now the honest part.

If you generate a signature with any of the popular free tools and you use, say, Outlook desktop, Outlook mobile, and occasionally webmail, your installation checklist looks like this:

1. Install in Outlook desktop
2. Install separately in Outlook mobile, in a simplified form because mobile won't render the HTML
3. Install separately in Outlook on the web
4. Test all three
5. Discover the mobile one looks different
6. Accept it

That's for one person. For a fifteen-person team, multiply by fifteen — except you can't do it for them, because these settings live inside each individual's app. So instead you send an email with instructions and hope.

Realistically, a subset of your team will do it. A subset will do it partially — desktop but not mobile. A subset will not do it at all. And in six months, when the logo changes, you run the entire exercise again from scratch.

Three structural reasons it works this way:

Signatures are client-side by design. Historically the signature is a text snippet the client appends before sending. It was never architected as a company asset, so there's no central place for one to live.

Every client stores them differently. Local .htm files in classic Outlook. Cloud-roamed in new Outlook and Outlook on the web. .mailsignature files in Apple Mail. Server-side in Zoho. There's no shared format and no interoperability.

Mobile clients deliberately limit HTML. For performance and security reasons, most mobile mail apps restrict what they'll render in a signature field. This isn't a bug, and it isn't going away.

The server-side alternative

There's a different approach that sidesteps all of it: apply the signature at the mail server rather than in the client.

The signature is attached as the message passes through your mail flow, after the user hits send. The consequences are worth understanding:

• Nothing to install. No per-device setup, no instructions email, no chasing.
• Mobile is automatically covered, including "sent from my iPhone" replies, because the server doesn't care which client sent the message.
• Updating means updating once, not forty times.
• Nobody can opt out, accidentally or otherwise — which matters when the signature carries statutory disclosures.

The tradeoff is real and worth stating: because the signature is added after sending, the sender doesn't see it in their compose window, and it may not appear in their Sent folder exactly as the recipient sees it. Some people find that disorienting at first.

This is the model most centralised signature tools use, including what we're building at Signforus — one template, deployed across the whole team, priced flat rather than per seat, aimed at Indian teams of five to fifty. We're in early access now.

Quick reference

Whatever you use, do this last: send a test email to an account on a different provider, and open it on your phone. Desktop-only testing is how broken mobile signatures survive for months.

Menu paths reflect the current versions of each client as of July 2026. Microsoft in particular has been changing Outlook's signature interface — if a path doesn't match what you see, check whether you're in classic or new Outlook first.