INKHOUND(1)

A WYSIWYG editor for Apple Mail HTML signatures. Design a signature on your Mac, hit save, and it's live in Mail — no account, no server, no subscription.

Get it on the Mac App Store How installation works

macOS 15+ Free for personal use No account English · Deutsch · Русский

Name

inkhound — a native macOS app for designing HTML signatures for Apple Mail

Synopsis

Open Inkhound. Design a signature with the WYSIWYG editor — text, links, an image by URL, your usual layout. Save. Inkhound writes the signature straight into Apple Mail's own signature storage and relaunches Mail so it's ready to use.

Description

Apple Mail's built-in signature editor is plain text plus a drag-and-dropped image. Getting a properly formatted HTML signature into Mail otherwise means editing Mail's internal files by hand. Inkhound is a proper editor for that: a WYSIWYG canvas for building the signature, and a writer that saves the result directly into the format Mail already reads — Mail's iCloud Drive Mail folder and/or ~/Library/Mail, wherever your signatures live.

There is no placeholder signature to create in Mail first, no copy-pasting HTML into a hidden file, and no separate service in between. Inkhound reads and writes only on your Mac, with your permission.

Features

• WYSIWYG editing — formatting, links, layout — with an HTML source view for anyone who wants to look under the hood.
• Images by hosted link (https://…) only. This is deliberate: embedded or attached images are not reliably rendered by Gmail and Outlook, so Inkhound doesn't offer them.
• Writes directly into Apple Mail's own signature storage — the iCloud Drive Mail folder and/or ~/Library/Mail — via a folder picker you control.
• Quits and relaunches Mail automatically after saving, so the new signature is ready without a manual restart.
• Signatures can be exported and shared as .inkhound files and reopened as a draft on another Mac.
• Available in English, German, and Russian.

Install

Inkhound is free to download from the Mac App Store.

Requirements

macOS 15 or later.

Account

None. Inkhound has no sign-up and no user accounts.

Permissions

The first time it needs to, Inkhound asks you to pick the Mail folder it should write to — a standard macOS folder picker. Nothing is accessed without that explicit grant.

How it works

When you save a signature, Inkhound writes Mail's own .mailsignature file format into the folder you granted access to (Mail's iCloud Drive Mail folder and/or ~/Library/Mail), then quits and relaunches Apple Mail so it picks up the change. There is no intermediate server: the file goes from Inkhound to your disk, directly.

Images inside a signature are referenced by https:// link, never embedded or attached — the same approach big webmail providers expect, so your signature actually renders the same way for the people you send mail to.

License

Personal use is free. Design and use as many signatures as you like on your own, personal mailboxes, no cost, no time limit.

Business use — using Inkhound with a company or organisation mailbox, or otherwise in the course of business — asks for the Business license: a one-time in-app purchase of USD 3.99 (your local price is shown in the App Store before you buy). It's one license per user — every person at an organisation who uses Inkhound gets their own.

This is an honour system, not a technical restriction. Nothing in Inkhound is locked, gated, or disabled — the app simply shows a "Business use" badge when a signature is assigned to a mail account on a non-personal domain (a company's own domain, rather than a general consumer mail provider), as a reminder to pick up the license if you haven't. Purchases are handled entirely by Apple; use Restore Purchases in the app to recover a license on a new Mac.

Full terms, including the license terms above, are in the Terms of Service.

Privacy

Signature content never leaves your Mac — there is no server of ours in the loop for reading or writing signatures. Inkhound uses PostHog (EU, Frankfurt) for basic, anonymous product analytics: app opens, that a signature was saved, your license status, and the domain part of your Mail accounts (e.g. example.com, never the full address) so we can tell personal from business use in aggregate. No signature contents, names, or full e-mail addresses are ever collected. Analytics can be switched off entirely in Settings → Privacy.

This website itself sets no cookies and loads no trackers, external fonts, or third-party scripts.

Full details in the Privacy Policy.

Support

Questions, bug reports, feature requests — write to:

The source is private; there's no public issue tracker.

See also

• Terms of Service — usage rules and the license terms.
• Privacy Policy — what data is and isn't collected.
• Impressum — legal notice (Anbieterkennzeichnung).