Using Tail Signatures

You might be wondering how to best utilize the Tail Signature feature of SignatureProfiler. I’ll give an example here that will hopefully make this feature clear. It isn’t really complicated, but examples are always good to see to give a good idea.

Tail signatures can include all of the other placeholders that SignatureProfiler provides, except for the tail signature placeholder itself. If that placeholder exists within a signature that you use as a tail signature, it will be replaced with an empty string to avoid a loop.

For our example here we’ll start with the tail signature for our example. Let’s assume that the Account that we will use actually has two email addresses attached to it (joe.shmoe@littleknownsoftware.com and john.doe@littleknownsoftware.com) and that we have set one to use the tail signature of the Account, but the Joe Schmoe uses a different tail signature. The configuration for this looks like this:

We can see that the tail for John Doe has been set to use that of the account. We can’t see the other in the image, but it is set to use “Display Tail 2″. With the original “Display Tail” signature looks like this:

You can see that in the Account configuration screen the tail example is udated to show what it will look like. Note that the user name is replaced as John Doe, however the user name of the account (entered in the Accounts preference pane) is set to “Display Account”. The “Name for Selected Address:” field allows us to override the Account settings for each email address if desired.

Okay, so now let’s look at a couple of example signatures for this account and see what the results will be. Here is the first signature as it appears in the Signatures preference pane.

And here you see the resulting mail with the values replaced. Note that the menu for choosing the address to send from shows the Account name (Display Account) and the email address (john.doe@littleknownsoftware.com). However, you’ll see that the replacements are relevant to the email address, with the user name being “John Doe” instead of “Display Account”, as was configured in the SignatureProfiler preference pane above.

As another example, if we start with this tail:

We will get, for the same original signature chosen in the mail composer screen, a message that looks like this, having chosen the joe.schmoe email address:

That’s about it really. Next I’ll do an example using the image and link replacements to show how those are used and why they are somewhat easier to use than the “Add Hyperlink…” menu item in the Signature preferences pane.