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7. Working together with your Mail & Newsreader

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


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