Signatures in Email

1. guanxi May 14, 2008

   Please, please fix bug 54570, which means getting rid of (or at least give user the option of eliminating) the “– ” delimiter.

   It causes incompatibilities with many things, including mailing lists, and as I say in a comment:
   https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54570#c63

   —

   > Given that there is a *very* widespread convention

   This simply isn’t true. Of the population of mail users, how many use this style of sig? Of the population of mail clients, how many support it? Almost none.

   Outlook, OE, Hotmail, Yahoo, gMail, AOL, and Lotus all do not implement it — or at least, I’ve never received an e-mail from one one of those apps that includes it. Other mail applications, like lists, don’t support it. That’s probably 95% of mail users.

   On my computer and all those my company supports, I never see it unless we configured TB to use it — and then we’re usually asked to remove it by puzzled users.

   The convention, to the degree there was one, is dead and buried.

   —

   Thanks!
2. John Silvestri May 14, 2008

   While it’s not used 100% for signatures, I rely heavily on the excellent Signature extension:
   http://signature.mozdev.org/

   Sure, its icons are dismal…but the ability to put canned text into a message quickly is invaluable. On that note, the ‘template’ feature of Tb2 seems quite useless to me, as I most frequently need to use common messages in *replies,* not new messages.

   I imagine it would take a lot of work to turn the signature into some form of ’smart text,’ whereby you could right-click it and pick another .sig or eliminate it, but that would be the nicest approach. For now, I simply press Ctrl-Shift-End, [Delete], and either leave it empty, or pick something else with Signature [above]. (I’m really kicking myself now that I followed the above link…I didn’t know I could hit Alt-/ to access it - I’ve been hitting Shift-F10 to get the context menu.)
3. Martin May 14, 2008

   I think smart tags (like in MS office) would provide a good way for changing between different signatures.
4. Hanspeter May 14, 2008

   Pegasus Mail used a nice pulldown menu along the compose window button bar that let you select what signature to use. You could create a whole bunch of signatures (and assign specific ones as the default for specific accounts), and if you needed to change it, you just selected it from the pulldown menu when needed. In the TB compose window, that would fit perfectly next to the other toolbar buttons.
5. Gen Kanai May 15, 2008

   Kohei Yoshino, who works for Mozilla in the Tokyo office, has a T-bird signature extension that he uses but has stopped distributing on the web. If you’d like to take a look at it, please email me.
6. Gen Kanai May 15, 2008

   Whoops. Used my personal blog url instead of my Mozilla blog
7. Jesper Kristensen May 15, 2008

   Everything else seems great to me, but I don’t like this one:

   “A separate dialog is used for managing all signatures, with import, add, edit, remove actions as well as a link to see the signature extensions available from AMO.”

   Please don’t introduce more levels of complexity to the preferences, remove complexity instead.
8. Bryan Clark May 15, 2008

   John: What you’re talking about seems to be the common use case for a lot of people. Signature and Quicktext are good examples of how this is being solved, but I think we can do a bit better specifically for the signature case.

   Martin: They look pretty nice, I’d like to see something like that tried. It should be simple to add at least for signature editing / removal.

   Hanspeter: I think that’s the kind of direction we’re going to head. It’s simple yet useful and then I hope extension authors can take over from there.

   Jesper: I thought about adding a separate sub-page under each account for signatures but I’m not sure that’s much better. How are you thinking of getting this done without the complexity of another dialog?
9. Jesper Kristensen May 16, 2008

   Bryan: I am not sure. Maybe just use one signature per identity.
10. Ron Killmer May 21, 2008

    I am glad to see the weakest aspect of Account Settings being addressed. For simple text Sigs, the proposed default is a good start.
    I would add two text fields into the Accounts dialog in the blank space. Labeled Sig name and a 4 line space for input. Put buttons under the text box for Create text Sig, Create HTML Sig, and Save Text Sig.

    Use the default as a sample to populate the text box.

    However, this would not do for a HTML Sig. There the Compose Window with it’s HTML tools is smart, as You have outlined. The creat HTML Sig button would open the compose window as the editor. Would need a new file menu item of Save As Sig … which can be coded to save to the default Sigs folder in a profile. That save action could then close the window and return back to the accounts dialog for added settings work.
11. Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » Some Signature Updates May 21, 2008

    [...] news for the Thunderbird signatures in email.  I’ve updated the Message Signatures wiki page with some new possible [...]
12. Thomas October 8, 2008

    Hi,
    signature management and signature creation inside Thunderbird is one of the big things that people are missing when switching to Tb. (I know that because I roll out Tb to the employees in my company. Is there some progress for Tb3? The wiki page is a little bit old (may 2008).

    p.s. I like the proposals for visual and technical enhancements of Tb in your blog and I hope that they will accepted and finished for Tb3.

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