Creating Signatures

Creating and selecting a signature is not that difficult in Outlook. However creating the signature you want with for example a company logo in it can be quite of a hassle.  This guide will cover both the basics and advanced examples on creating a signature in Outlook.

• Signature basics
• Creating separate signatures for Plain Text, HTML and Rich Text formatted mail
• Creating an HTML signature with a picture/company logo
• Creating a company wide signature/disclaimer with Exchange
• Random Quote Insert

Signature Basics

As stated before creating a simple signature in Outlook isn’t a hard task. Most likely you already have one. To create a signature and set options for it you go to;
Tools -> Options -> tab Mail Format -> bottom section Signatures

When pressing the Signatures… button you’ll get an overview of the already configured signatures. Press New… to start the Wizard to create a new signature.

Create New Signature Wizard

When you’ve specified a name you’ve got 3 options;

• Start with a blank signature; this will start the editor with a blank screen
• Use this existing signature as a template; this will start the editor with a copy of the selected signature (this option is only available when you already have at least one signature)
• Use this file as a template; this will let you choose a htm or html-file you’ve already created with e.g. FrontPage or Word. Outlook will copy the content of the file into the editor.

Within the editor you also have the option Advanced Edit… When you press this button you’ll open your default HTML editor to create your signature in, instead from within the Signature editor. Another option is to include a vCard. A vCard is a vcf-file that contains contact information. The Signature editor will let you easily create a vcf-file based on a contact you’ve stored in you’re address book. People receiving the vcf-file can now easily add all you’re contact information in their favourite address book as the vcf-format is supported by many contact management programs.

In the Signatures section on the Mail Format tab you can specify a default signature for new e-mails and the same or another signature on replies and forwards. With Outlook 2003 you can even specify different default signatures on an account basis.

When you have Outlook as the e-mail editor you can press the signature button or use Insert-> Signature to insert a signature. It will automatically expand when you have more than one signature configured.

When you have Word as the e-mail editor you must have a default signature configured or you won’t be able to select another signature while composing the mail. To select another signature right click on the left side of the signature and a list of available signatures will pop-up. If you don’t want a default signature you can easily workaround this by configuring an empty signature (just containing spaces or Enters or a single dot) as the default signature. This will still enable the right click menu so you can choose a signature when you want to.

the right click pop-up menu for signatures in Word

Creating separate signatures for Plain Text, HTML and Rich Text formatted mail

Once you’ve created a signature you might want to edit the signature to make them look better in Plain Text, HTML or Rich Text formatted mail. To do this you must go to the location where the signatures are stored. By default they are stored in the following location;
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures

Here you’ll find 3 files per signature; one for each possible mail format. A txt-file for Plain Text, htm-file for HTML and a rtf-file for Rich Text Format based e-mail. This will enable you to easily edit the individual files in your favourite editor and make sure they are shown correctly. For instance you can add extra spaces in your Plain Text based signature so that text is outlined correctly.

Note that when using multiple fonts in your HTML or Rich Text signature the fonts must also be installed on the computer of the recipient for it to show correctly.

Creating an HTML signature with a picture/company logo

When you want to add a picture or (company) logo to your signature you’ll have to use the advanced signature editor. This will only create a HTML signature. This is no problem as a Plain text signature can’t hold embedded pictures and Rich Text is not a recommended format to send outside your local company as it is unsupported by many other mailclients and/or servers. For more info regarding Rich Text click here.

A thing that is important is that you link correctly to the file. By default when using Word or Front Page as the advanced editor they will place a copy of the picture in the Signatures folder when the picture gets inserted by Insert-> Picture… By modifying the HTML Source code you can also link to a picture on a web location. By default Outlook will retrieve the picture from the Internet before sending the message and embed it in-line.

The code would be looking like this;
<img src="http://www.domain.com/pictures/picture.jpg" mce_src="http://www.domain.com/pictures/picture.jpg">

You can change this retrieval behaviour and have the receiver retrieve the picture instead. This will reduce the size of the actual send message. To do this go to Tools-> Options-> tab Mail Format-> button Internet Format and deselect the option shown in the screenshot below.

Note that when doing this and when the recipient is using Outlook 2003 the picture is blocked by default. However by right clicking on the placeholder the recipient can easily choose to download the picture.

Also note that linking to a picture for signature purposes located on a web location not owned or controlled by you is not considered as “nice”.

Creating a company wide signature/disclaimer with Exchange

As a company you might want to append a company wide disclaimer to all outgoing e-mails. If so it is easier to create an event-sink on the Exchange server than force everyone to create a specific signature. For detailed steps on how to accomplish this see the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles;
Add a Disclaimer to Outgoing SMTP Messages in Visual Basic
Add a Disclaimer to Outgoing SMTP Messages in Visual Basic Script

Random Quote Insert

Remember a long time ago people used to have random quotes at the bottom of their e-mail? Quotes like “There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.”, or “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog”. You can add famous quotes to outgoing email by using an Add-In from Sperry Software. The Random Quote Insert add-in has these features:

• Easily enable/disable the add-in - just turn it on, and every outgoing email will have a quote appended to the bottom of the email message
• Reads quotes from a text file containing over 500 quotes, included free
• Add your own quotes
• Works with plain text, RTF, or HTML based email formats
• Automatically avoids adding a quote to replies or forwarded email messages
• Integrates directly into Outlook
• Works with Microsoft Outlook 2003, Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2000

More info and a screenshot of the add-in can be found here. If you decide to order use “BH93RF24″ to get a discount.