Can't find "Signatures" in Mail

Question

"Mail Help" says I can go into Mail Preferences and click on signatures .... nothing there to click on. Then it says I can go to the "customize" pop-up menu in lower left corner of header and choose Customize. No such pop-up menu except if I open up a new message. I can go to "customize" but there's nothing about any signature options. Can anyone help???

Answer 1

There's a row of icons (General, Accounts, RSS, Junk Mail, Fonts & Colors, Viewing, Composing, Signatures, and Rules) at the top of the Preferences window, just below the horizontal area with the three colored buttons at the top left and the window title at the top center. Immediately below that are the details for the selected icons. In the case you're talking about, you're seeing the Accounts details, with the list of Accounts on the left, and the three tabs for Account Information, Mailbox Behaviors, and Advanced to the right.
If you don't see the icons at the top, something's wrong with your Preferences pane. Have you tried running Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities) to Repair Disk Permissions? Perhaps, a file permission is damaged and not displaying the complete window properly. You could also go to the ~/Library/Preferences folder (the Library folder in your user account, not at the root) and move the com.apple.mail.plist file to the Desktop, then restart Mail to see if anything's changed. If you see the icons, you're done, if not, put the com.apple.mail.plist back where it was (select the Replace option when it asks). A more severe option would be to move the Mail application to the Trash, and rerun the MacOS X installer to have it rebuild the Mail application.
To see if the issue is strictly with your account, and not the System, go to System Preferences (under Apple Menu, top left of screen), select Accounts, and create a new Administrator account by clicking the + at the bottom left of that window. Then, log out of your current user account and log into the new account you just created. This account has all the operating system default configuration options. Go to the Applications folder and startup Mail again. You'll have to enter your email info again, but that doesn't hurt anything, this is just temporary. After the Mail app tests your email credentials and gives you the standard Mail window, go to Mail/Preferences again and see if the window looks the same as it does in your normal user account. If it does, the problem is with your Mail application and it will have to be reinstalled.
At that point, you could move your Mail application to the Trash, insert your MacOS X Installer disk, and run it again, this time selecting the Archive & Install option, preserving your data, account settings, and network settings, and let it rebuild your System and the now missing Mail application. Of course, after doing that you'll have to rerun Disk Utility to Repair Permissions again, then run Software Update (System Preferences) to get all the operating system updates again.
Let us know how your diagnostic progresses.
Sorry for the partial double post. I had a problem editing the previous post.