7. Working together with your Mail & Newsreader

There are two ways of attaching a signature to your Mails & News:

• The simple method is to attach a text file. Nearly every program supports this. This means that the signature will only change when you run makeSIGN - add either by yourself or from some kind of batch file (your autoexec.bat, your STARTUP-Folder or your crontab perhaps). Most of the Linux software looks for a signature in ~/.Sig by default.
• Some Mail & News software is able to launch an external application for every signature. The output of this application is then used as the signature. This is why makeSIGN can be configured to write to stdout. This allows great flexibility and a fresh signature for every Mail or News.

7.1 mutt

mutt allows text files and external applications to be used. Just edit your ~/.muttrc and add the following line to it:

set signature=SOME_FILE

SOME_FILE might be a text file (e.g. ~/.Sig) or an application (e.g. makesign myconfig_file). If it is an application, the line has to end with a pipe symbol (¦).

7.2 tin

tin allows text files and external applications to be used. Start tin and press M to enter the setup menu. Select option 61. Create signature from path/command.

To use a text file as signature, simply enter the name of the signature file (e. g. ~/.Sig). To use a signature generated by an application, enter the name of the application prepended by an exclamation mark (e. g. ! ~/signature-gen.sh). To use no signature at all, enter --none.

If you set option 62. Prepend signature with "-- " to ON you don't need to call makeSIGN with the option --separator.

You can edit the keys default_sigfile and sigdashes in the file ~/.tin/tinrc respectively.

NOTE: If you call an application to generate the signature tin adds the current newsgroup as an extra commandline argument. This will confuse makeSIGN because it looks for a signature file with the name of the newsgroup. To avoid this, you have to write a small shell skript that "eats" this extra argument and give the name of this script to tin.

#!/bin/sh
makeSIGN [your arguments]

This provides extra flexibility. You can generate different signatures depending on the current newsgroup that you are posting to. Take a look at this script:

#!/bin/sh

NEWSGROUP=$1

case $NEWSGROUP in
    de.comp.os.linux*)  SIGNATURE="sig-linux";;
    de.talk.jokes*)     SIGNATURE="sig-dtj";;
    *)                  SIGNATURE="sig-generic";;
esac
makesign ~/$SIGNATURE.cfg

It uses different configuration files (~/sig-linux.cfg, ~/sig-dtj.cfg, ~/sig-generic.cfg) depending in the newsgroup that you are posting to.

7.3 Your software isn't listed here?

Then please mail a description of how to add a signature to your software to mitch@uni.de

I plan support for at least pine, knews, kmail, Netscape Messenger and Microsoft Outlook Express.