Placeholders

A placeholder is a token such as {{jobTitle}} that is replaced with directory data when a signature is rendered. Coverage roughly matches the Microsoft 365 attribute set you would expect from a signature product.

The list is defined once on the server and offered to both editors through the API, so the pickers cannot drift from what the renderer resolves. If a placeholder appears in the autocomplete list, it renders.

Identity

Placeholder	Directory source
{{displayName}}	displayName
{{firstName}}	givenName
{{lastName}}	surname
{{email}}	The sending address. Also builds the Teams deep link

{{email}} is the address the message is actually being sent from, which may be an alias rather than the mailbox’s primary address. See how it works.

Contact

Placeholder	Directory source
{{businessPhone}}	The first entry in businessPhones
{{mobilePhone}}	mobilePhone
{{fax}}	faxNumber

Role

Placeholder	Directory source
{{jobTitle}}	jobTitle
{{department}}	department
{{companyName}}	companyName
{{employeeId}}	employeeId
{{employeeType}}	employeeType

Address

Placeholder	Directory source
{{streetAddress}}	streetAddress
{{city}}	city
{{state}}	state
{{postalCode}}	postalCode
{{country}}	country
{{officeLocation}}	officeLocation

Note that city often holds a compound value in practice, such as “Hoyland, Barnsley”. Check attribute coverage to see how your own directory is populated before you build a layout around it.

Manager

Placeholder	Directory source
{{managerName}}	The manager’s display name
{{managerJobTitle}}	The manager’s job title
{{managerEmail}}	The manager’s mail address
{{managerPhone}}	The manager’s phone number

Manager details are pulled with Graph’s $expand=manager on the compose path. People with no manager set in the directory resolve these as empty, so wrap them in a conditional section.

Extension attributes

Placeholder	Directory source
{{extensionAttribute1}} through {{extensionAttribute15}}	onPremisesExtensionAttributes

The fifteen extension attribute slots are exposed under their raw names rather than friendly ones such as pronouns or bookingUrl. Sigil cannot enforce a single meaning per slot across organisations, so the meaning lives in your template.

Two Graph behaviours are worth knowing. These attributes are only returned when explicitly selected, which Sigil does. And they are writable for cloud-only users but read-only for users synced from on-premises Active Directory, so populating them may mean changing AD rather than Entra.

Derived helpers

Placeholder	True when
{{anyPhone}}	The person has any phone number at all
{{anyAddress}}	The person has any address component at all

These exist for conditional sections rather than for printing. Attaching a whole contact row to {{#anyPhone}} lets the entire row disappear for people with no phone number, instead of leaving an empty label or a stray separator behind.

Conditional sections

Wrap optional content so it disappears when the underlying attribute is empty:

{{#jobTitle}}{{jobTitle}}{{#department}} · {{department}}{{/department}}{{/jobTitle}}

Here the department and its separator only appear when there is a job title to attach them to, and the whole thing disappears for someone with neither.

Sections nest freely. In the designer, the same behaviour is available on any block through its “visible when” field.

What the renderer guarantees

Values are HTML-escaped when they are substituted, so a directory value containing < or & cannot break the markup or inject anything.

Any placeholder left unresolved is stripped. A literal {{jobTitle}} can never reach a recipient, even if you mistype it.

Checking before you rely on an attribute

Attribute coverage shows which of these are actually populated across your organisation. Run it before designing a signature around an attribute, particularly one of the extension attributes, where population is entirely up to each organisation.