animated gif in Mac mail

Animated Gifs will not work in preview but will work in Safari ( as long as they are small ones) and TextEdit.
There are several third party apps that will also show them animated. MacJournal, Bean, MacNote etc.

If you really must use them: Save a few in a TextEdit document or similar by dragging them in from forums or elsewhere then you can copy and paste or just drag them into your mail message.

Note : They will not animate in your copy of the message but the recipient should see the gif animated.

Yes as Ashka has described you can insert animated GIFs into Mail. If you want them to be part of your signature then do the following.

Go to Mail/Preferences then select the Signature tab. You will see a Plus (add) button below the middle pain, select it Give your signature a name, then in the far right pain you can type the signature that you want and drag an drop you animation into that pain. Now that you've created the signature, below is how you add it to mail.

After selecting Create new mail you will get the new message window where you would fill out the To:/From: and body of message. If you look below the subject line and to the far lift you will see Signature, if you only have one signature then it will default to it, but if you have multiple signatures then you can select which one you want for that email.

Now I have a question for you??? How did yo fix your Canoscan driver problem, could you post it in the thread then re-mark it as answered?

If your recipient is using Mail on Mac OS X 10.5.x, they will not be animated. Apple removed that feature from Mail, but did not disclose that information.

I've been on the phone with Apple Mail tech support and we couldn't get the
animated signature to work with Apple Mail. I'm checking to see if the guy
who created it for me can design one to work with Apple. I did as you suggested
a number of times but the signature isn't animated.

I received a reply from the man that designed the .gif animated signature for me. He said this:

Yes, it's animated. However, it's not inserted as you would expect from Outlook Express, for instance.
At the end of your message there is a horizontal line with the sig below it in the middle of the page. There is then another horizontal line and beneath that the message body that you're replying to.
From the message source, I see that the message is formatted in plain text. However, in order to insert a picture, wherever you want, in the body of a mail message, it has to be formatted in Rich Text (Html). Do you have an option to format the message in Rich Text (Html) ?

I had called tech support again last week and he devised something but it came over as an attachment. Guess it's not going to work.