Even though Apple has released a lot of improvements in iOS5, there is still only one signature that is used for all email accounts. The default signature is "Sent from my iPhone" or "Sent from my iPad", however, in many cases you'd like to have your contact info in it.
And if you're like me, you have both your private and work email accounts configured on the device.
But there's only one signature! So, what do you do? Most will just leave it at the default. I thought that with the introduction of the keyboard shortcuts, it should be quite easy to add a separate signature for each email account. It's still not ideal, but it works.
First off, I changed the default signature to only include the signature escape and my name. For those not familiar with signature escape and (vintage) maillist systems, that is usually dash-dash-space. Most older maillist systems used to ignore everything past "-- " so I made a habit of including this in every signature. Currently most systems are more intelligent and will see the signature automagically so there's no real need for this.
Anyway, the first step:
the second step is to create a keyboard shortcut.
I named it "sigpriv" (private account signature d'oh) and as text chose "marco@marcof.net -- http://mf72.eu" - reference to my email and website.
For my work account I chose "sigvf" as shortcut (VF for Vodafone, my employer) and email -- telephone -- website as text.
It's too bad it has to be one single line, it would be cool if you could use a full paragraph as text.
Anyway, when composing the email I now only have to go below my default signature, enter the corresponding shortcut and boom, done!
It's still a bit cumbersome, I'd rather have iOS let us define a signature per account, but it works.
(Yes, TextExpander makes this possible too, but you need to work from within TextExpander. The iOS5 shortcuts work across all apps)