Within a company, you usually want to control the signatures that users are using when sending mail outside of the company. Most companies want to include at least a “disclaimer” text, others want to control the amount of contact details as well and still others want to control the entire look and feel of the signature.
Outlook offers no direct means to do this since the Signature feature in Outlook is a client side feature and thus users can create and modify their own signature. You can lock down the access to the Signature feature by using Group Policies but that still doesn’t take away the issue of creating/generating a standard signature in the first place and deploying it to the users.
This guide discusses the features that Exchange offers to create and manage signatures at server level. Also, additional methods are being discussed to manage it without an Exchange server. Finally, an overview of 3rd party solutions is provided for alternative solutions.
Exchange 2013, 2016, 2019 and Microsoft 365 Exchange Online offer support for HTML based signatures and retrieving user information from Active Directory to dynamically create personalized signatures as well as static disclaimers.
Creating an Disclaimer rule in the Exchange Admin Center.
As mentioned before, you can use practically any Active Directory user property as a variable by placing it between double percent character like
Example: %%DisplayName%%
Below you’ll find some frequently used AD properties for signatures;
Extra tip!
You can also automatically include a personalized “Chat with me in Teams” link within the signature or include links for other online meeting tools such as Skype, Zoom, Cisco Jabber or Slack. For more details to create such links see; Add Teams, Skype, Zoom and other chat, call or meet now links to your signature.
Signatures and Disclaimers can also be created via the New-TransportRule Exchange PowerShell cmdlet. They can later be managed via the Disable, Enable, Get, Set and Remove cmdlets.
The example above becomes the following PowerShell command;
New-TransportRule -Name 'Corporate External Signature and Disclaimer' -FromScope 'InOrganization' -SentToScope 'NotInOrganization' -ApplyHtmlDisclaimerText '
Yours faithfully,
%%DisplayName%%
%%Title%%
If you are not using Exchange or are looking for a client (Outlook) level solution to generate your signatures, you can do this via a script. There are various ways to do this of course but there are a couple of common things to keep in mind when going for a custom script;
Below you’ll find a sample script to help you on your way, it is not intended for use as-is.
Click in the area above and press CTR+A to select all. Press CTRL+C to copy the code.
Open Notepad, paste the code in the editor and save the text document as a vbs-file.
Set generated signature as the default signature
As mentioned before, you’ll need to set and remove additional Registry values in order to have Outlook use the deployed signature as the default for newly created emails and replies and forwards.
Their string values need to be set to the name of the signature.
After Outlook has been started, the First-Run key is being added back again and the NewSignature and ReplySignature values are automatically being removed. When multiple mail accounts are configured, they will all have their new and reply/forward signature set to the ones specified in the Registry file.
The example below makes the appropriate Registry modifications for Outlook 2016, Outlook 2019, and Office 365 and uses the signature name of “Standard Signature”.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Setup] "First-Run"=- [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\MailSettings] "NewSignature"="Standard Signature" "ReplySignature"="Standard Signature"
If all of the above solutions do not fit your needs, not to worry! There are plenty of 3rd party solutions available to manage corporate signatures at either Exchange or Outlook level. A short list can be found below;
