#770 new
Meindert

Signatures

Reported by Meindert | May 14th, 2014 @ 04:32 AM

I understand the revolutionary "Think Different" deliberate design of signatures in MailMate. But personally I prefer the conventional way.

I think the MailMate way would be good for someone with a university and personal e-mail, both of which he may use to send mail to friends and family. This may be the developer's experience and background, and why MailMate was designed the way it is.

But I don't think it's so great for a situation like mine, where I have a single personal e-mail, and other e-mails for two separate companies, each of which has registered DBAs (which are DBAs because I want them clearly branded separately from the companies). So all these e-mails should be clearly siloed.

If someone sends an e-mail to wrong address, I don't want the program to recognize the sender and put up an appropriate signature. I want for me to recognize the mistake and change the From header to the correct account in the reply. If I choose the wrong account to make a new e-mail, I'd like the signature to help alert me of that. In fact, in Sparrow the signature for my personal account had a prominent "THIS IS MY PERSONAL ACCOUNT!" line at the top that I deleted before sending, just to ensure I never used it to send e-mail to a business associate.

With MailMate I usually get my main business's signature coming up for any e-mail. I probably haven't used the program enough for whatever intelligence to kick in that is in the algorithm. But I really don't want an AI interface determining my signature. I'm reminded of the crazy to-do list program Life Balance from Llamagraphics. You can't just make a list. You have to enter all your items in categories and ranked by importance and whether they were personal or business, and tell the program you life ambitions and aspirations and so on and so forth, and the program would then magically put up the item that you should be working on at that moment. In practice you spent more time diddling with the settings trying to get it to throw up the thing you knew you had to be doing because it was due and you'd be fired if you didn't do it right now, but Life Balance's algorithm wasn't producing it.

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny May 17th, 2014 @ 12:27 PM

    First of all, I don't oppose the idea of making it possible to make MailMate have more “classic” signature behavior, but I would prefer if this was possible by making the current signature system more flexible. Offering the best of both worlds instead of it having to be either-or.

    One way might be to offer a popup for each signature in which one can enable/disable each of the existing accounts or select “Any Account”. This could be used to restrict MailMate to only use specific signatures for specific accounts.

    I'm not sure though that this would solve your problem. This is because I'm not sure how the problem of someone sending to the wrong address is relevant with respect to dynamic signatures. It appears to me to also be a problem in other email clients -- somewhat confirmed by your special signature in Sparrow. But maybe I'm not getting the point.

  • Meindert

    Meindert May 20th, 2014 @ 03:56 AM

    I'd like that popup.

    It's not so much people sending to the wrong address as me using the wrong address to send, but not realizing it because the "correct" signature is displaying. I just don't know why a particular signature is displaying at a particular time (hence, the Life Balance analogy): not enough training time? I made a previous mistake and it "learned" that and is not unlearning it? if I reset am I back to zero?

    Also, in the signature preference dialog table, how about displaying the signatures in their multiline form, rather than in the more literal database format with carriage return or line feed or whatever symbols? It's hard to read that way.

  • benny

    benny May 22nd, 2014 @ 11:26 AM

    • State changed from “new” to “accepted”

    The choice of signature is relatively simple: MailMate reuses the signature that you used for your most recent message to the same person. If that does not exist then MailMate uses the most often used signature for the sending address. It, of course, requires that MailMate has access to your sent messages.

    Yes, resetting would make this “start over”.

    The one-line signatures in the tableview are just meant as a quick hint. Double-clicking an entry allows you to see the entire signature. Note that many signatures would probably not look much better in a multiline table view.

  • Phil Stone

    Phil Stone October 19th, 2014 @ 10:25 AM

    I would like to add to this please. Like Meindert I have multiple accounts, one personal and others for work. For work emails I need to have a specific signature which I wouldn't want to use for my personal emails. For work emails I don't often need to email someone more than once or twice and so Mailmate's learning approach to signatures doesn't help me.

    I really do need to be able to determine which sending accounts have which signatures, or no signatures. I completely accept that there are alternative implementations of signatures but to use Mailmate fully (as I would like to do) and including my work emails I do need control of the signatures. I would imagine that others Mailmate users have a similar requirement.

    If this signature control can be made available that would be brilliant. An option perhaps to always have signature A when using account B would be excellent.

    Thank you.

  • benny

    benny October 20th, 2014 @ 01:31 PM

    @Phil: You are correct that others would like this feature as well. I've recently had a number of requests to be able to bind signatures to accounts. I'll update this ticket if there is any progress on the issue.

  • benny

    benny October 22nd, 2014 @ 01:45 PM

    • State changed from “accepted” to “fixcommitted”

    The latest test version (r4583) includes an attempt to make this more configurable. Each signature can now be assigned to an email address (or set of email addresses). If you want to try it out then hold down ⌥ when clicking “Check Now” in the Software Update preferences.

  • Phil Stone

    Phil Stone October 22nd, 2014 @ 02:49 PM

    Thanks for the update Benny. I have downloaded and installed 4583 but I still only see the same signature options in preferences as I did before. Am I looking for the new feature in the correct place?

  • benny

    benny October 23rd, 2014 @ 09:43 AM

    @Phil: There should be an additional column in the signatures list. If you double-click a signature then you should see an “Address(s)” text field. Do you not see this?

  • Phil Stone

    Phil Stone October 23rd, 2014 @ 11:46 AM

    Benny, yesterday when I opened the preferences my default window size was such that I didn't spot the addresses text field. Apologies.

    Now that I have found that field I have tried to use it. I have one signature which I assigned to work with only one of my email addresses. But when I opened a new email with my default email address (which wasn't the one configured to have that signature) the signature appeared.

    Similarly, when I opened a new email and set it to send from the signature email address the signature was there, but when I changed the sending email address in the drop down box the signature wasnt removed as I would have hoped.

    Phil

  • benny

    benny October 23rd, 2014 @ 12:15 PM

    • State changed from “fixcommitted” to “accepted”

    Ok, thanks for trying. I'll do some more testing.

    The second problem is simply because I haven't implemented that (yet).

  • benny

    benny October 24th, 2014 @ 01:33 PM

    @Phil: You can try again now (r4587). I believe I also fixed your second issue.

  • Phil Stone

    Phil Stone October 24th, 2014 @ 03:02 PM

    Benny. It works perfectly now. I set up a different signature for each of my email addresses including a blank one for one account. Now when I compose a new email and change the sending email address the signature changes immediately. Thank you!

  • benny

    benny October 24th, 2014 @ 03:03 PM

    • State changed from “accepted” to “fixcommitted”
  • benny

    benny March 24th, 2015 @ 12:16 PM

    • State changed from “fixcommitted” to “fixreleased”

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