Pausing delivery
Pausing stops every mailbox in your organisation receiving a signature, and changes nothing else. The library, both editors, the preview, the test email and the per-mailbox download all keep working while it is on.
That asymmetry is the whole point. An organisation partway through a rollout has the add-in reaching mailboxes in waves and a template that is not finished. Without a pause, the only way to stop delivery is to leave the add-in undeployed, which makes the deployment itself impossible to test. Pausing separates “is it working” from “is it live”.
Where the switch is
Section titled “Where the switch is”On the Templates page, in the header of the In use card. It shows a Live or Paused badge and a Pause or Resume button next to it.
Pausing asks you to confirm. Resuming does not, because resuming restores what people already expect.
While delivery is paused the whole Templates page carries a notice saying so, above everything else on it. Everything below that notice describes a signature nobody is currently receiving, which is worth being told before you read it.
Changing it needs the Assignment rules capability: an Admin, a managing partner’s Owner, Admin or Technician, or a custom role that includes it. It is the same capability as choosing the active template, because these are the same decision from two ends: one decides which signature a mailbox gets, the other decides whether it gets one at all.
Pausing
Section titled “Pausing”- Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
- In the header of the In use card, choose Pause.
- Choose Pause signatures in the confirmation.
The badge changes to Paused, a message says nobody is receiving a signature, and the notice appears at the top of the page.
Resuming
Section titled “Resuming”- Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
- In the header of the In use card, choose Resume.
The badge changes to Live, and a message says the next message composed gets a signature.
What stops and what does not
Section titled “What stops and what does not”| Surface | While paused |
|---|---|
| The add-in applying a signature in Outlook | Applies nothing |
| Download from the “My signature” pane | Refused |
| The template library, both editors, drafts and publishing | Unaffected |
| Preview, including preview against a named mailbox | Unaffected |
| Test email | Unaffected |
| The admin-side per-mailbox download | Unaffected |
| Assignment rules, banners and footers | Unaffected, and still take effect when you resume |
| Seats and billing | Unaffected |
“Applies nothing” has one visible exception. The add-in keeps a copy of each person’s last signature on their device and draws it straight away, before it has heard back from Sigil. So the first message somebody writes after you pause can show their old signature for a moment, then clear it when the refusal arrives. The copy is deleted at the same time, so it happens once per person and device. If Sigil cannot be reached at all, the add-in has no refusal to act on and the kept copy stays. See how it works.
The last row of the table is the one people expect to work differently. Pausing is a delivery control, not a commercial one. Your seat count and your subscription carry on exactly as they were, so pausing for a month does not reduce a bill. If the reason to stop is cost rather than readiness, excluding mailboxes is the tool that changes what you pay.
Resuming
Section titled “Resuming”There is nothing to purge and no cache to wait out on Sigil’s side, because the pause is checked before any cached signature is consulted. A paused organisation is never served a stale copy of what it had before.
The add-in adds a delay of its own, and it is the thing most likely to be reported as resuming not working. A mailbox that has just been refused is not asked about again for ten minutes: the add-in notes the refusal on the device and stops an automatic message there rather than asking Sigil a question it answered a moment ago. So the first message after you resume can still go out unsigned, for anybody who was writing messages while the pause was on. The ten minutes run from the last time Sigil itself refused that mailbox, not from the last unsigned message: messages stopped on the device in the meantime do not restart the clock. The note is kept per mailbox, and separately for new messages and replies. Somebody who has not composed for a while is unaffected.
Opening the “My signature” pane and pressing Apply my signature skips the wait entirely, because the pane always asks Sigil. See a refusal is remembered for ten minutes.
What it looks like elsewhere in the portal
Section titled “What it looks like elsewhere in the portal”Pausing and resuming are recorded in the change log as “Paused or resumed signatures”, with who did it and when. Pressing the button for the state already in force records nothing, so the log holds the two events that matter rather than a run of repeats.
Requests refused because of a pause are recorded in
activity with an outcome of paused, and the event
search has a filter for them. They are recorded rather than dropped for the same
reason an excluded mailbox’s request is: a stream of them tells you the add-in is
live and working, and the only thing stopping a signature is the switch.
The health digest leads with the pause and says the coverage figures below it describe a deliberate choice. It also stops listing mailboxes that have never had a signature applied, since under a pause that is the whole organisation and none of it is a fault.
Doing it from a script
Section titled “Doing it from a script”PUT /api/admin/signature-delivery takes { "paused": true } or false, and
GET /api/admin/templates reports the current state as signaturesPaused. An
API key can reach both, but they need different capabilities.
The write needs the assignment rules capability and a key that is not marked
read-only. The read needs the templates capability. A key that holds only
assignment rules can still pause and resume, and the reply to each write gives
the state now in force, but it cannot check the current state without sending a
write.
Being reachable by a key is deliberate. Cutting delivery over during a mail migration, or holding it while a rollout script runs, is the kind of step that belongs in automation rather than in somebody remembering to press a button. See the API reference.
When to use it instead of something else
Section titled “When to use it instead of something else”| Situation | Better tool |
|---|---|
| Setting up, and nobody should receive anything yet | Pause |
| Cutting over from another signature product | Pause, then resume once the old product is off |
| A specific mailbox should never get a signature | Exclude the mailbox |
| A change is risky and you want it to reach people gradually | Staged rollout |
| The current signature is wrong and an older one was right | Restore a version |
| You want to stop paying | Exclusions, or cancel in Billing |
A pause left on is silent to everyone except the administrators who can see the portal. Nobody receives a warning that their signature has stopped, because from a user’s point of view nothing has broken. If signatures are missing across the whole organisation and nobody knows why, this is the first thing to check. See troubleshooting.