James Dempsey has updated his tutorial on how to create your own fancy stationery in mail.app for Snow Leopard.

First posted in 2007, he has updated it to make sure that nothing got broken in the last two years.

He walks through the process of finding, opening and modifying an existing mail.app stationery bundle in eleven easy steps.

Sometimes it helps to have things described in more than one way, so check out the tutorials at The Apple Blog , and the tutorial and templates at Technosanity as well.

And don’t forget the “Related Links” below. The plugin does a good job. Sometimes they are actually related!

Jumsoft has released a new collection of ten free email stationery templates for mail.app.

Opinions are divided on whether HTML stationery is a good idea, but you will remember from the 2006 WWDC Keynote presentation that Steve Job is a fan. Like he said, “You can drop your own photos in here and move things around. Birthday announcements, dinners, you name it.”

The templates cover a range of possibilities — birthdays, the birth of a boy or girl, party invitations, and so on:

They all contain place-holders for your own photos and text. Creating your own masterpiece is just a few keystrokes away:

The templates are free and easy to install. You can get them from the Downloads section of Apple’s web site.

equinux, purveyors of fine HTML stationary for Mail.app, has released a new collection of Christmas stationery templates in plenty of time for the festive season.

“Season’s Greetings Vol. 2″ contains templates offering Christmas greetings, invitations, wishlists for your kids to send to Santa, templates for one of those much-loved “annual news-roundup” emails.

Kwanzaa and Hanukkah are not forgotten. Templates are included for those festivals too.

For those not in the know, Apple Mail’s stationery feature allows the app to send pre-made HTML emails, often quite fancy. Many of the equinux templates allow for customization by the insertion of your own photos and user-definable fonts:

The pack costs €7,95 (c. USD 11.80) and is available from equinux’s web site where you can also see the company’s other stationery packs.

If you are keen on this kind of thing, and know that your friends don’t mind receiving them, but you don’t want to shell out money for the option, you will find some freeware seasonal stationery templates listed in the following, previous Hawk Wings posts:

1. Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates.

2. More Mail Stationery, for sale and for free.

[via macnews.de ]stationery, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, addons, Christmas, hanukkah, Kwanzaa, festive season, more bandwidth-sucking tomfoolery

Jumsoft has released a pack of additional mail stationery templates for Leopard Mail.

The pack contains 50 “high-quality and exclusive design options for every occasion”, covering Family, Congratulations, Invitations, Emotions, Vacations and Seasons themes.

An additional group are described as “Neutral”, or multi-purpose.

You can view small thumbnails of all the templates on the Jumsoft web site, but some examples of the “Neutral” category are displayed below:

    

The pack costs USD 39 and is available from Jumsoft’s web site .

Value-conscious readers will want to compare this pack of 50 with the pack of 111 templates from equinix (reviewed in an earlier Hawk Wings post). The equinix pack retails for 24.95 euros (c. USD 40), twice as many template choices for almost the same price.

Of course, really value-conscious readers will want to make their own (see earlier Hawk Wings post ) or look at the increasing number of stationery templates offered for free.

Novcon.net has started a collection of free stationery templates, which now contains sixteen examples. Users can rate the ones they like best. The current winner is an attractive “parchment” template.

The Novcon site also contains instructions on how to install the stationery.

Templates in the Jumsoft pack and on the Novcon.net site are now listed in the Templates section of the comprehensive Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List.templates, stationery, html, leopard mail, mail.app, apple mail, plugins

Just in time for all those festive season emails comes a Christmas Stationery template for Leopard Mail.

Mail Stationery is new feature of Leopard Mail, which allows you send emails wrapped in pre-made HTML templates (if you are into that sort of thing).

Christmas Stationery is suitably Christmas-like as you can see:

It comes placeholders for three images and lots of snow flakes scattered around the bottom of the text area.

It was developed by the German blogger at tice.de, and is available from his web site in English and German versions. mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, HTML, stationery, mail stationery, outrageous waste of bandwidth but it is Christmas

Someone at the University of Chicago has whipped up a Leopard Mail Stationery template as an exercise in testing the drag-n-drop images wells in the default stationery templates.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but offers a more image rich environment than the standard templates provide.

After installing it (double-click on the downloaded file), you can drag-n-drop away to your heart’s content:

Photo Cluster is freeware and is available from a web page at the University of Chicago.

Along the same lines, those expecting a baby girl and distressed by the lack of a pink Baby Announcement template in Leopard Mail will find relief in the work of Ed Dyer, who has tweaked the existing blue one to offer a pink alternative.

He writes about it on the Apple Discussions and has made the template available for download from his iDisk .eye-candy, mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, stationery, HTML, templates, baby girls

equinux has released a pack of 111 additional HTML stationery templates for Leopard Mail.

The templates comes with a (fairly basic) dedicated browser app which displays them sorted by keyword and allows you to search for particular themes.

Quick Look is integrated into the browser, allowing a quick, more detailed view of each template. It is also possible to launch a new Mail message from the browser.

A Window on the left displays the templates by theme and keyword:

Whatever one’s personal stance on HTML and Mail.app, there is no doubt people will use the new feature a lot. Here they will find templates that are are well-crafted and varied, and do provide clever alternatives to the defaults included in Leopard Mail. Most contain drag and drop image fields.

Here are two examples:

You can buy this stationery pack for 24.95 euros (USD 36) from the equinux web site .

Or you can make your own (see earlier Hawk Wings post ). mail.app, apple mail, templates, stationery, add-ons, html, leopard mail