Here's a thing that surprises people the first time: an email sent through the API does not carry the signature the user set up in Gmail or Outlook. Provider signatures live in the provider's compose UI, and a programmatic send bypasses that entirely, so a message your app sends goes out with no signature at all unless you add one. The Nylas Signatures API is how you add it: store an HTML signature once, then attach it to a send by ID, and the signature gets appended to the message for you.

This post covers signatures from two angles: the HTTP API your backend calls, and the nylas CLI for creating and testing one from the terminal. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I reach for when I'm setting a signature up.

Nylas signatures are separate from provider signatures

The first thing to get straight is that these are not the user's existing signature. Nylas doesn't sync the signature configured in Gmail, Outlook, or any other provider, and that provider signature is never applied to mail sent through the API. If a message your app sends needs a sign-off, you create that signature with this API and attach it explicitly; there's no inheriting it from the connected account.