Core concepts
Sigil has a small number of moving parts. Knowing how they relate makes the rest of the documentation easier to follow.
Tenant
Section titled “Tenant”A tenant is one customer organisation, keyed by its Microsoft Entra tenant id. Everything you create belongs to a tenant, and every request is scoped to the tenant on the caller’s token.
Template
Section titled “Template”A template is a signature design containing HTML and placeholders. Templates live in a named library, so you can keep as many as you like. Each one carries its own version history.
A template is authored either in the designer, which edits a block tree and compiles to email-safe HTML on publish, or in the HTML editor, which edits that markup directly.
A role is a slot that a template fills. There are two: new for new messages,
and reply for replies and forwards. The template assigned to the new role is
what people usually mean by “the active signature”.
Assigning a reply template is optional. Without one, replies get the new-message template.
Each template can carry one unpublished working copy. You edit and preview a draft without changing what anyone receives. Publishing promotes the draft, files the outgoing body in version history, and clears the draft. See drafts and publishing.
A draft can also be submitted for review, and an organisation can require that every publish is approved by an admin. See publish approval.
Scheduled publish
Section titled “Scheduled publish”A publish booked for an instant you choose rather than applied now, for a change that has to land at a particular moment. The body is captured when the schedule is made, so later edits do not alter what goes live. See scheduled publishing.
Version
Section titled “Version”Every publish archives the body it replaced. Sigil keeps the last ten published bodies per template, each template with its own independent history, and any of them can be restored in one click. See versions and rollback.
Rollout
Section titled “Rollout”A publish that goes to part of the organisation first. The template keeps serving the current body to everyone outside the slice, and the new one spreads through 10%, 25%, 50% and then everyone as the add-in reports that it is applying. If it applies worse than the version it would replace, it is withdrawn automatically. See staged rollouts.
Assignment rule
Section titled “Assignment rule”An ordered list of predicates that refines which template a person gets. Each rule matches on a directory attribute equalling one of a set of values, or on membership of an Entra group, and names a template per role. First match wins; anyone unmatched falls back to the organisation-wide roles. See assignment rules.
Banner
Section titled “Banner”A time-boxed image injected above or below every rendered signature while its window is open. Banners need no template edit and remove themselves when the window closes. See banners.
Footer
Section titled “Footer”A legal or compliance block appended below every rendered signature at render time. Because no template carries it, no template can forget it. There is one footer per email domain, plus an optional default. See footers.
Placeholder
Section titled “Placeholder”A token such as {{jobTitle}} that is replaced with directory data when the
signature is rendered. Placeholders can be wrapped in conditional sections so
that optional content disappears when the underlying attribute is empty. See
placeholders.
Profile field
Section titled “Profile field”A custom field an organisation defines and its own staff fill in, used in a
template as {{custom.pronouns}} and behaving like any other placeholder. It is
the one group of values that does not come from the directory, for the things
that do not belong there: pronouns, a personal booking link, a direct line.
Nothing in it is read from or written back to Entra. See
profile fields.
Tracked link
Section titled “Tracked link”A redirect under e-clk.usesigil.app/r/<slug> that counts clicks without
recording who clicked. Banner links are always tracked. A template opts in per
template, which rewrites its static links at render time. Links containing a
placeholder are never rewritten, and hits from security scanners are counted
apart from the human ones. See link clicks.
A billable licensed member mailbox. Shared and resource mailboxes are unlicensed and therefore free. Accounts invited in from outside the organisation are excluded, as are disabled ones. See billing.
An organisation can also decide which of its licensed mailboxes have Sigil at all, either by excluding the ones that do not need it or by naming the only ones that do. Either way the mailboxes left out come off the bill and stop receiving a signature at the same time. See cost management.
Portal role
Section titled “Portal role”A permission level inside the portal, stored per tenant and assigned by an administrator. The six roles are Admin, Editor, Marketing, Viewer, Compliance and Billing. The Entra token establishes who you are and which organisation you belong to; the portal role decides what you can do. See users and roles.
Partner
Section titled “Partner”A managed service provider running Sigil on behalf of a client base. A partner is not a tenant: the MSP’s own signatures live in a normal tenant, while the partner record owns the client relationships and the consolidated bill. See the partner programme.
How they fit together
Section titled “How they fit together”On every compose, Sigil answers three questions and assembles the result:
| Question | Answered by |
|---|---|
| Which template? | Assignment rules, falling back to the new or reply role |
| Which banner, if any? | Whichever campaign window is open right now |
| Which footer, if any? | The sending address’s email domain, falling back to the default |
The chosen template is personalised with that person’s directory attributes, the banner is injected above or below it, and the footer is appended underneath. The whole thing is cached against those three identities and their versions, which is why publishing any of them takes effect immediately.