I was having an issue where I’d send an email from my work account to my personal account and when the email arrived in Outlook it would contain the email signature, but on my iPhone the signature would be missing.

I created a new signature in CodeTwo’s Email Signature platform and set a plaintext version of it to be simply: 

“Professional Webinar Attendee | My Work”

I then sent plaintext from my work account laptop to my personal account. What arrived in Mac Mail / Outlook Mail is the plaintext email with signature. What arrived on my iPhone was again missing the footer. I then resent the message from my work laptop to my personal account and I manually typed the words, “Professional Webinar Attendee | My Work” as the signature in the outgoing email. What arrived in my inbox on Mac Mail and Outlook Mail was:

“Professional Webinar Attendee | My Work

Professional Webinar Attendee | My Work”

On my iPhone I only had:

“Professional Webinar Attendee | My Work”

So I figured that there’s some encoding change that is happening between the signature that I manually typed and the signature that is added by CodeTwo. Luckily I host my personal email on a cPanel server, so I grabbed the email file from my cPanel server and compared the email in NotePad++. There is absolutely no encoding change in the plaintext.  It literally is:

“Professional Webinar Attendee | My Work<LF>

<LF>

Professional Webinar Attendee | My Work<LF>”

Well this doesn’t make sense. How does the iPhone know that the second line doesn’t belong? The only way it could know that would be if it compared the incoming email to the outgoing email. Turns out that both accounts (work and personal) are installed on my phone. I removed the work email account and powered off my phone. 10 steamboats later I powered it back on and sent a new test from my work account on my laptop to my personal account. TWO signatures as it should be on my iPhone! I added my work account back on to my phone and sent a new test. ONE signature, same problem as before. 

I had some other work users send test email to my personal account with the work email still active on my iPhone. Signature shows up fine. I send from my work account to my personal, signature is missing again.

I truly believe the iPhone is comparing email from sent to received and only showing me the sent email. I’d bet it’s doing that for “efficiency” so that it uses half the storage space on emails that are sent to itself on the same device. Probably Apple’s logic.

CodeTwo worked fine. It was me all along.