[tbaucells]

I know a lot of you hate html anything in your emails but I would really like to be able to show my Skype online status to selected friends and family as part of my signature in messages, mostly to encourage the recalcitrant to adopt the app and save me money on phoning them! I should say I'm a sole Mac user amongst a sea of PCs (nothing unusual there but it means iChat is not viable) and we live in various different countries so this is nothing to be sneezed at.

I have followed the instructions on Skype's own web pages and, whilst everything appears to work fine just after I have created the button/signature, when I next compose a message and add the signature, either the button is missing or it shows my status incorrectly (usually as that which was valid at the time of creation).

Since html Mail messages do not always render correctly on PCs - they end up as a load of gibberish if you use accents as I do since I write in French, Spanish, Catalan and Italian as well as English - I tend to compose as plain text (though even then, a lot of the text is almost unreadable, as I find out when a friend replies quoting my message). The signature actually shows up on a test message when received in Gmail or Yahoo if I use rich text mode, even though I couldn't view it correctly whilst composing, but is absent if I use plain text mode.

Has anyone had this problem and found a solution?

As an aside, does anyone know how to cure the PC rendering of Mail problem?

Using OSX 10.4.11 on a Macbook Pro 15