I'm just about fed up with Evolution by now, and I'm looking for ways to
loosen my dependency from the monster (see upcoming entry). It tries to
be way too smart with your data and makes some basic things matters for
hair-pulling. One example concerns e-mail signatures. I have a
~/.signature, as has been the convention since the beginnings of days.
I've found it ridiculously hard to get Evolution to work with that.
Evolution 2.x allows you to paste in a signature, or set up a script to generate signatures, but not to use an existing file. I tried hacking up a script along
the lines of cat ~/.signature but that didn't work because Evolution
expects you to use <br> in your script output rather than newlines.
WTF! I not using HTML mail, damn it! Yeah, I could hack around that using sed and all that, but I shouldn't have to. After some googling and
experimentation I finally figured out a workaround recipe.
1) Create a signature using Edit -> Preferences and then `Composer
Preferences -> Signatures -> Add. Give it the namesymlink .sig` and
put some easily spotted but inconsequential text in the body. Save it.
2) grep foo ~/.evolution/signatures/* where you replace "foo" with
your dummy body text from the last step. This will tell you the file in
which Evolution saved the dummy signature.
3) Clobber the dummy signature with a symlink to your .signature file,
e.g. ln -sf ~/.signature ~/.evolution/signatures/signature-5
4) Go to the Mail Account preferences and set symlink .sig as the
signature for each account on the Identity tab.
5) No Evolution restart required (small mercies, folks)