Original author Victor Sirotek
Have you ever wanted to send beautiful, image rich email messages to clients or friends? The most recent update to Apple’s OS X, known as Leopard, included a large update to the Mail application. Mail now supports stationery design for your email. Stationery is an easy way to send emails that are more casual than formal email newsletters, but more visually rich than a standard text message. Very handy when you want a message with some punch, or some cute kittens.

Mail makes it easy to use Stationary templates that are predesigned. But naturally, I wanted to know how to make my own.

Minding the eternal urge, I took this new toy apart. After a few hours digging around Google and in the deep recesses of my computer, I discovered that all Stationery really consists of is standard html and graphic files that have been neatly packaged for mass consumption. Each Stationery file is a complete tiny website packaged so that Mail can recognize it.

Interesting? Here’s how to build your own stationery for Mail. You will need:

An html editor (Dreamweaver, TextMate, TextEdit)
A photo editor (Photoshop, Graphic Convertor)
A basic knowledge of how html works
A fearless desire to try out new things

Before jumping in and making your own Stationery, see how the feature is designed to work. Open Mail and create a new message. In the upper right of the new message window, you will see a button that says “Show Stationery.” Click that to open a panel of Stationary templates. Click around to see how these will affect your document.

Now let’s go find those Stationery files in your system. Here’s the trail: Library > Application Support > Apple > Mail > Stationery > Apple > Contents > Resources > Stationery > Contents > Resources. I know that was quite a lot of folders, but it is worth the trip.

Once you are there, you will notice a bunch of icons that look like envelopes with letters. Pick one and make a duplicate of it and you will be ready to start experimenting. It doesn’t matter too much which one you choose, though it does help if you pick one that has a layout similar to what you would like to end up with.

Once you have your duplicate file, rename it making sure to keep the “.mailstationery” on the end of the file name. Then right click (ctrl+click) and select “Show Package Contents.” This will open up that cute little envelope and let you make some edits.

Once you are inside the “package” or stationery file, you will see images and a file named content.html. To edit the stationery, you will need to open content.html in your html editing program. If you don’t know how to edit html, now would be a good time to find someone who does. I will leave that to your own ingenuity.

The key when you are editing this file is to keep it very simple. You will notice that the stationery that Apple provided looks like a very basic web page. You should follow that thinking in building your design. You can create your own layout and link to whatever images you want, just like when creating a normal website. Just make sure that they are stored in this same folder and that there aren’t extra files that you aren’t using in here.

After you feel you are in good shape, close the stationery up and go back to the folder that it is stored in. Look for a file named “TableOfContents.plist.” Open this file in a text editor such as TextEdit. You need to add the name of your new Stationery to this list for mail to see it. After you have done that, you can close everything up.

You should be ready to start testing your Stationery now. Open Mail and make sure your creation is listed. If you need to make updates or instructions, follow these instructions again.

There you have it. Now you can use your Mac to create custom email stationery for your business, to send to friends, and of course, to your mother. When was the last time you wrote to your mother?