Create Clever Custom Email Signatures with Signature Profiler

I’ve been looking for an application that does this for a long, long time. Little Known Software’s Signature Profiler is a plug-in for Mail that was recently updated to be compatible with Leopard. The plug-in’s core functionality has not changed: it allows you to create dynamic signatures and tie them to specific accounts in Mail. Yes, you can handle multiple signatures in Mail out of the box, but you can add snazzy features that change in every email you send by installing this simple plug-in.

Back when I first started using email (when 2400 was fast and gopher was cool), everyone used PINE, the free, text-only email client originally made available by the University of Washington. PINE, which stands for “Program for Internet Mail and News” was a killer app on the then-new internet and made the new medium of electronic communication easy to manage and use. Like most of the applications on my school’s UNIX server, I quickly picked up the rudimentary pieces of how to use PINE but marveled at some of the advanced tricks that power users could make it do… like include witty quotes and snippets of movie dialog in a signature at the end of every email.

At first I thought that people were changing their signatures frequently, but then I realized that some of my geekier pals were running some sort of script which pulled a random signature out of a database of hundreds of the things and placed it into each email. Very cool.

Fast forward more years than I would care to admit and we arrive at today. I use a Mac, the most advanced consumer PC on the planet, and the built-in email client lacks this functionality. I have looked for and found complex solutions involving Terminal scripts but never really thought them worth the effort… and then, this morning, I found Signature Profiler. I have kept a text file of quotations on my MacBook in anticipation of this day and setting the app up and putting that first Deep Thought by Jack Handy into my outgoing email was easy and fun.

To begin, you download the app from the developer’s website and mount the disk image. Since it’s a plug-in, you need to run an installer then quit and relaunch Mail. Once that is done, just open Mail’s Preferences and click on the new pane. The interface isn’t as simple as it could be, but a quick read of the included README file should set you straight. The app does two neat tricks: first, it can insert information about the current iTunes track into your email signature. I don’t need this feature, but it’s a cool idea. The second thing the app does is what I was after. I had to point the plugin to my quotations.txt file and it gave me a nice preview of what the quotes would look like. Of course, the txt file wasn’t formatted just right, so I had to fiddle with it a little. I used TextWrangler to insert a colon between each quotation and the name of the person who said it and to eliminate the blank lines between each quote. Once that was done, the plug-in just worked!

The interface is a little confusing and the documentation leaves something to be desired. But, if you want this functionality, this app is pretty-much your best bet. It’s Shareware with no limitations on the free version and is available from the developer’s website.