Signatures in Email

Last week I was blitzed by being cc’d on a lot of email signature related bugs. :-)  To remain calm and keep delusions of control active I started on a wiki page for Message Signatures in Thunderbird.  Right now the page contains lots of links to relevant areas and ascii art mockups for choosing a default signature for accounts; it’s meant to collect thoughts, research, and define direction.

Managing Signatures

I think a general improvement plan will involve simplifying the signature selection and creation process.  Here are a number of points that I think can improve the current aspects of signature management.

• Each account is created a default signature (from the person’s name and organization)
• Every signature can be edited with a built-in signature editor (created from the compose window)
• Signatures can be imported from files, but are saved in the Thunderbird profile or preferences (see bug 324495)
• 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.

Concept Mockup of Signature Chooser in Account Settings

Using Signatures

In the relevant extensions section of the wiki page I tried to list most of the extensions that are dealing with how to use signatures in the compose window.  There are a number of ways of solving this problem and lots of issues surrounding posting style that I am hesitant to battle with.

Several bugs (see bug 219197, bug 73567, and bug 37644) have suggestions that attack the problem from different angles.  New comments and suggestions are welcome!

ASCII Art Side Note

I think I’ve started to use Johan’s ASCII Art Mockup post as a reference for my own ascii art; it’s good to see some style written down somewhere.

Syndicated 2008-05-14 14:18:16 from Bryan Clark