Create your own customised email template. Download workfiles here.

Equinux offers a Stationery Pack for mail with 100 templates, however I found that they are not worth the money. I couldn’t find much on the net on how to create an email template for Leopard Mail myself. With some basic knowledge in HTML and a couple of sites I managed to make sense of it and had a go. Here are 4 examples to download and learn. Please note that Movies & Receipe are my templates and the other two can be found on the net also.

Hopefully it is easy enough to follow, please feel free to comment.

1. Find

You get to the Stationery templates by going to the Library> Application Support> Apple> Mail. Stationary> Apple> Contents> Recourses. I have created an extra folder “custom” where I have saved all my customized mail packages. You can download the ones I have done here. Chose one of the  “mailstationery” files – for example Movies.mailstationery. Copy and rename it to your own theme.

2. Copy

You need to Control/right click on one of those “mailstationery” files to Show Package Contents to get to the files you need to edit.

3. Edit

You need to open a couple of files in your html editor (I used BBedit):

*Open Description.plist and change the word “Movies” to your own theme:
<key>Folder Name</key>
<string>your own theme.mailstationery</string>
<key>HTML File</key>
<string>content.html</string>

*if you have a subfolder like English.lproj then you need to change the name in this file too

*You will need to open content.html to edit your own design theme once you have created your design and pngs in Photoshop.

*Once your email template is looking how you want it create a screenshot and size it according to the existing thumbnail.png.

4. Design

Once you have a design in Photoshop, you need to slice this into 3 parts: header.png, content_bg.png (content background) and bottom.png. Make sure you save the pngs under the same name and replace them in your new mail package.

5. basic coding

With some basic knowledge in HTML you should be able to change the height of your pngs in content.html, adjust the fonts and colours if you want to and create a thumbnail image.

6. Save

Save your themed mail package in Library> Application Support> Apple> Mail> Stationary> Apple> Contents> Recourses> Custom. Restart your mail and you will find your new template there. You can edit the text and start sending.

References & Websites I found useful

Customised Mail Letterhead templates (English)

Create custom OSX stationery in Leopard (English)

Eigene Email-Vorlagen erstellen (German)

Leoprad: Email-Vorlagen erstellen (German)