Review: iSignature – sophisticated e-mail signature management

The iPhone gives you the ability to automatically add a signature to your e-mails, but I don’t use this feature because I don’t want to have the same signature on every single one of my e-mails.  But every once in a while I want to use my full firm e-mail signature, and it sure is a pain to have to type it out manually on the iPhone.

AL Software has come up with an ingenuous solution with its $0.99 app called iSignature.  This app gives you the ability to create six possible signatures.  To use one of them in a new e-mail, just launch the iSignature app, and you will see previews of the first seven lines of up to six different signatures.  Just tap the one that you want to use:

After you tap the signature that you want to use, the Mail app will open with the signature you selected automatically in the contents portion of the e-mail.  You can then just type your e-mail and the signature will be at the bottom.  In the first picture below, you can see that Mail has launched with my cursor in the “To” field and you can just barely start to see my signature.  In the second screen, I have scrolled down so that you can see my full signature, which in this example has eight lines:

   

The app also works if you want to reply to (or forward) an e-mail.  To do so, just tap the button to reply to an e-mail like you normally do, but as soon as your new reply e-mail screen comes up, tap the Home button on your iPhone to exit Mail and start iSignature.  Then tap the signature that you want, and iSignature will return you to your reply e-mail with the signature automatically added.

Before you can use iSignature, you need to set up your different signatures.  You do this not in the iSignature app itself, but instead by going to your iPhone Settings and then scroll down to the bottom where application-specific settings are located.  Tap on iSignature and you will have a place to enter Line 1, Line 2 and Line 3 for up to six signatures.  Of course, with just three lines, how did I manage above to have a signature with eight lines? This is actually quite simple: just add \n to enter a new line.  For example, you can see on the below screen that I have the line …Jeffrey E. Richardson\nAdams and Reese LLP … which will cause a line break between my name and my law firm.  Using the \n feature you can have a signature with as many lines as you want:

If you want to get fancy with your signatures, you can even use HTML tags.  For example, let’s say I want to have a signature with my name and then “iPhone J.D.” in bold.  To do this, I just add <b> before to add bold and then </b> to turn off bold.  In the left you can see how I do this, and in the right you can see how the Mail app correctly renders the text as bold:

   

Here is another tip.  The way that iSignature works is that it adds two line breaks followed by the text to the top of your e-mail.  This is why you normally want to let iSignature do its thing before you type your e-mail, so that you can type at the top and have the automatically entered signature block move down to the bottom of your e-mail.  But you can also use iSignature to automatically add any text to the top of an e-mail.  For example, let’s type an e-mail to a client that is privileged.  I want my signature block at the bottom, and I want to have a confidentiality warning at the top.  To do this, I first start up iSignature and top my signature block, which in the below screen is at the top left.  Then I type my message.  Then, when I am ready to add the confidentiality language at the top of the e-mail, I press the home button to return to iSignature, and this time I will tap a signature block at the bottom left which consists of <b><i>Privileged and Confidential Attorney-Client Communication</b></i> (which will format that text in bold and italics).  iSignature will then return me to my e-mail with the confidentiality language at the top.  Unfortunately, iSignature always adds two blank lines before it enters the text, so I will want to manually delete those two blank lines, but the result is that I have automatically entered text at both the top and the bottom of my e-mail:

   

The only HTML codes I have used so far are bold and italics, but if you know how to use more advanced HTML codes, you can get even more complicated.  But whether you use complicated signatures or simple ones, it is wonderful to have a choice of six that you can choose to use or not use, instead of the current Apple solution which is to always use the same signature block every time.

Note that you will want to make sure that you don’t already have an e-mail signature on your iPhone.  If you do, your message will contain both the iSignature block and the standard signature block.  Go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> Signature and make sure that it is blank before you start using iSignature.

My only complaint about iSignature is just that I wish we didn’t need the app in the first place.  I wish that Apple would add the ability to use macros in an e-mail.  That way, whenever I want to add a pre-defined block of text — whether it be the signature at the end of the message, or just some long string of text someplace else — I could do so.  But until Apple adds this feature, this simple app is definitely worth $0.99.

Click here to download iSignature from iTunes for $0.99: 

(Thanks to Brian Beam at Macworld for his review which made me aware of this app.)