For years, I have built a file of signatures, so that every email message I send has a different signature on the bottom of it. I use simple tools – just a plain text file, processed using the ‘fortune’ utility. In my mail client, I just configure my signature to be “|/usr/games/fortune signatures” and the Right Thing Happens. When I add something to the signatures file, I run ‘/usr/sbin/strfile signatures’ which generates signatures.dat in a format that ‘fortune’ understands.

It appears that I can’t do this in Thunderbird.

And all my online searching leads me to something called TagZilla, which, as far as I understand it, completely fails to do anything remotely like what I want.

With any luck, one of you, my loyal readers, will know the answer to this. Google appears not to know.

(Oh, by the way, what I ended up doing on one machine was to run a cronjob every 5 minutes which does “/usr/games/fortune signatures > /home/rbowen/.sig”. That’s not really what I want, but it’s working for now. What I’d like is the ability to have it inserted automatically, and then be able to reload if a signature is generated which is not appropriate to the message that I’m sending.