(only of interest to people I’ve emailed or Mac App geeks)
Do you remember the cool quotes that used to appear below my emails? I had a lot of them, and they were set to cycle randomly. These are “signatures” and in OSX standard email application mail.app they’re (or more to the point, were) stored in a file called “signatures.plist” (in Users/you/Library/Mail/Signatures).
Somewhere around 10.3 the format of these files changed, and because I did a new install and not a convert, I managed to lose them. D’oh. As of 10.4 (or so) there was a new format (allowing different signatures for different email addresses). 10.5 may even be a little different. This is a “property list” file, which is sort of like an xml file but somehow different. Within the file, each signature is encoded rich text. No matter that my signatures were all plain text, they’re garbages up so they’re unreadable, even in Apple’s Property List Manager app. And there doesn’t appear to be any application that’s capable of extracting the signatures from the plist file.
I’ve got the original files, and I’d like to pull the .sigs out of them. I used to put all the cool quotes I came across here, and nowhere else. What I’m going to have to do is install an old version of OSX on a spare iBook and then try to get the file to open.
Update: Yep, that did it. Leaves me wondering whether I need to keep an old machine around to convert old straggler files.
On Linux I would expect this file would be editable in a text editor; modern versions would be simple xml. Not sure how Thunderbird (the Mozilla/Firefox email reader) handles them, but I bet they’re editable.
In other news, I’ve got OSX 10.5 installed on three machines (including a G4/800 iBook that’s “too slow” via target disk mode). Yawn. It’s pretty and all, and the autobackup is great, but otherwise no big whoop. Looking forward to mobile Home directories (on iPod?) and of course to future laptops/handhelds. Sometime this month would be fine.