14 DAY TRIAL // E-mail has all but replaced traditional mail in every day use, and for good reasons. It's almost instantaneous and it is incredibly cheap, not to mention that with it being handled by a computer it can be stored and sorted. However, due to all these factors, sometimes handling e-mail can become a chore, and when you start working with multiple accounts, it can be quite the pain. While having multiple accounts is definitely the way to go, there are certain issues that pop up. After all, the way you write mails to your friends differs significantly from the way you write mails to your business associates, and even between people that belong to the same groups, your e-mail changes based on who you are talking to. As such, it would be nice to be able to have a smart method of handling the signatures, which are an important part of an e-mail message based on your accounts and recipients.
The signature handling present in Apple's Mail is very basic, so the only option is a third party solution, such as SignatureProfiler for Mail.
What it does SignatureProfiler is a Mail plugin that enhances the signature features in order to give you better control over the way the signature looks, especially if you use multiple email accounts or multiple email addresses for the same account.
As a plugin, it does not function as a separate application, but adds itself to Mail's preferences, so you can access it directly from within the application.
Working with it The way SignatureProfiler works is by using special strings that when encountered in your e-mail are replaced with information relevant to your settings and by combining different signatures in one.
The strings are quite easy to work with. If you add {user.name} to a signature for example, it will be automatically be replaced with the username for your specific account. This makes it quite easy to have 'universal' signatures that have the proper information regardless of the account from which the mail is sent, without having to make multiple instances of the same signature only with different names in them. There are several such strings available. Other than {user.name}, there is also {email.address} and {itunes.display.info}. As you might have imagined, the latter adds information about the song currently playing on iTunes to your signature. There are even several sub strings that let you add specific bits of info, such as {itunes.playing.song}, {itunes.playing.album} and {itunes.playing.artist}. Exactly why there is so much support for this is unclear? How many of the people you write to are interested to see what song you were listening to at the moment the mail was written? For the majority of mails, the only truly useful strings are the name and address, still, it is a shame these are the only ones.
The other option SignatureProfiler has is to let you use a 'tail signature', which is basically a signature that is automatically added to all mail of an account, regardless of the signature used in the mail itself. This can be useful for adding contact information that need not be present in the signatures you define yourself and is specific only to a certain account.
Room for more SignatureProfiler is not a bad program, and the features it has take a load off working with multiple signatures across multiple accounts, but it could do so much more. Why the developer chose to dedicate so much attention to iTunes integration is uncertain, but it seems a waste of time. If that time and effort had been spent in a better integration with Address Book, by letting you assign custom signatures and greeting for your contacts, and crossed this would account integration so that I could have totally different signatures and greeting when writing people from different accounts, this software would be great. Currently it is just ok.
The Good
Makes it significantly easier to handle multiple signatures across multiple accounts tight integration with Mail and easy to set up and use.
The Bad
While it does eliminate the need to have multiple instances of the same signature, it is nevertheless not the perfect solution. The iTunes integration is a weak feature at best.
The Truth
If you need to start using multiple e-mail accounts and have to make sure that you have signatures under control, then SignatureProfiler will make things easier for you. If you are already set up, this program offers little and there is no real benefit to remaking all your signature setup.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
