How to create auto signatures centrally in Office 365 Exchange Online
Many are asking if they can make use of centralized auto signatures in Exchange Online in Office 365. The answer is yes - and its done using Disclaimers.
To automatically apply disclaimers to e-mail messages, you use Transport Rules. You create Transport Rules in the Exchange Control Panel - just click Manage My Organization > Mail Control > Rules and start building the desired rule.
Clicking New will present you with a dialog in which you can specify that you want the new rule to fire on all messages and you want it to append a disclaimer to evey message.
Next up is specifying the appropriate text in the disclaimer. The disclaimer text can include HTML tags and you can add user attributes to disclaimers. For example, you can add DisplayName, FirstName, LastName, Department, and Company to create personalized signatures. Here is an example of a (very) basic disclaimer:
When the disclaimer is added to the message, the attribute names are replaced by the corresponding values from the sender's user account.
Testing the disclamer
Compose a message (with no signature to begin with - will be inserted by the transport rule)
The recipient sees the message with the signature inserted by the Transport Rule:
Here is more on how to build your own centralized auto signatures - Link
Bonus info: Loryan Stant (Office 365 MVP) elaborates a bit on the variables and an exception you can apply - link
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Probably the easiest way is to take some unique text from the disclaimer and use that instead of the RE: suggestion. #justathoughtAnonymous
January 01, 2003
technet.microsoft.com/.../exchange-online-service-description.aspx and YesAnonymous
August 16, 2012
The difference is a disclaimer always appends to the bottom of an email, if you're replying to an email you wont want it at the bottom of the email, you'll want it at the bottom of your addition to the emailAnonymous
September 27, 2012
Agree with Jim, using the disclaimer option will always append to the bottom of an email, which is fine when initially sending the email but should someone reply from within your organisation, their signature will append under your original one. You could set up an exception to not appeand if RE: is in the subject field but this causes other issues. It seems strange that there isn't a global signature option.Anonymous
October 15, 2012
Thanks Stephen, that's a good suggestion. I might add a unique phrase to the signature and since it's html, i'll be able to hide it. This could be a good workaround. CheersAnonymous
November 30, 2012
Stumbled upon this post a few days ago when I was looking for a signature tool for our E3 on Office 365. There is also a bunch of third party signature managers for composing and centrally adding sigantures for Office 365 and OWA. We're now trailing this one www.mail-signatures.com- Anonymous
August 04, 2016
Hi,This is great and all, doesn't Microsoft offer something in 365 that is at no extra charge? It seems like there's always a "3rd party" service that costs more. I don't know, but I think my client may not like this. We just want to set a universal signature email for a couple companies, and be done. This seems a little overboard
- Anonymous
Anonymous
January 11, 2013
Agree with all of these -- rather useless as a good signature tool because the sig alwasy ends up at the end. I do see ways that rule logic could be used to better manipulate...but M$ has broken that ability to do this! They limit the total length of the rule so severely that creating a normal marketing signature along with needed logic rules is not possible.Anonymous
April 04, 2013
One command is all you need - set-mailboxmessageconfiguration -identity <alias> -signaturehtml (get-content <path to html file>) -autoaddsignature $true Downside to this, it has to be done for each user. So, I created a CSV with all the variables (such as name, job title, telephone etc) and then ran a powershell script to echo the lines of html and varibles in a foreach loop to an html file ($_.alias.html) and then ran the above command (in the same loop). Happy to post if any one needs some help FYI, to replace a user signature, update the html file (and on csv file) and run the command/script again and it will be replaced. Signature automatically appears as it would do in outlook. This works for OWA and Outlook If you are doing this for Office 365, give 15 minutes (theoretically up to 48 hours) for changes to replicate across all Hub transport servers FYI, in Exchange 2013 (Office 365 Wave 15), you can also add -autoaddsignatureonmobile $true. Speaks for itself Hope that helps, it has worked wonders for me!Anonymous
April 10, 2013
@Chris Howett - i would very mush like for you to post your solution. If you could do so, it would be a great help, thank you. BR DavidAnonymous
May 06, 2013
Just FYI, I checked out the tird party tool from: www.mail-signatures.com and it inly works for OWA and Windows Outlook; not Mac and not Mobile.Anonymous
May 31, 2013
Hello Chris, It would be great if you would post you work around for the signatures in Powershell. It is a little vague and I would love to try. Thanks PeggyAnonymous
June 29, 2013
Hi Jesper, Thanks for your post. Please could you tell me what version/plan of 365 comes with the transport rules feature. This is my main requirement for sourcing a hosting solution, so need to know what version to purchase. If you could please also tell me if this adds the disclaimer to users using an email client (Outlook, Outlook for Mac, Mac mail etc..) not just when sending through webmail. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, LiamAnonymous
November 07, 2013
@Chris Howett - i would very mush like for you to post your solution. If you could do so, it would be a great help, thank you.Anonymous
November 11, 2013
Chris, we would apreciate very much if you could post the code. Thanks in advance.Anonymous
November 21, 2013
I'll give Chris Howett's solution a try. I'll post it here if I manage to nail it. Wish me luck!Anonymous
January 22, 2014
Is this solution relevant anymore? I can not even find 'Mail Control' in the current Office 365 Exchange admin center.Anonymous
February 04, 2014
Any luck with this powershell method of adding signatures? Chris, can you post some code please?Anonymous
February 27, 2014
Hi Chris...Can you please post the code to help us to do.Anonymous
March 26, 2014
Hi Chris, please shed light for us. Thanks.Anonymous
May 24, 2014
He is referring to the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration and the available parameters to configure signature in OWA(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638117(v=exchg.150).aspx). This will NOT affect Outlook in any way, only OWA.Anonymous
May 30, 2014
I did not see the answer to this question...can you exclude the disclaimer if it's already posted in a conversation/reply?
If so, how do you do this? Thanks.Anonymous
June 23, 2014
We've tried using the built-in solution, but since it was always at the bottom it looked rather strange. We've recently started using a 3rd party solution (Impactia - www.impactia.com) and it's a much better fit to our needs. We're also using some of their advanced features (mobile, etc).Anonymous
June 25, 2014
This is a disclaimer, and completely 100% utterly useless as a signature.Anonymous
July 09, 2014
This works beautifully for us.Anonymous
September 11, 2014
Try a third party tool - Crossware Mail Signature - www.crossware.co.nz
It works for Exchange and Office 365 - appends signatures on all outgoing emails regardless of the device you use to send the emails.
You have the flexibility to position your signatures after your reply or at the end. You can configure signature according to groups - have internal and external signatures and a lot more.Anonymous
November 19, 2014
If we enact this disclaimer does it still allow the user's personal signature to be put on their email? We would like to add our confidentiality disclaimer to every email from our organization, but would still like to allow users to have personal signatures.Anonymous
December 09, 2014
Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration seems to work fine for OWA with Powershell, not sure how to get -AutoAddSignatureOnMobile working though as doesnt seem to work on iOS or Windows Phones though maybe not understanding something here ..Anonymous
February 19, 2015
hi,
is it possible to add an image in the disclaimer. when we use a link to an image outlook and OWA block this.Anonymous
March 16, 2015
Is there away to add a field with phone numbers globally? Just like the %%First Name%% and %%Last Name%%?Anonymous
June 08, 2015
Marculos,
The -Auto-AddSignatureOnMobile parameter is kind of misleading. What it actually does is it sets the signature on the mobile version of OWA. If your device is using its built-in email app, you will still not be sending out the signature you configured with the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration command. It's kind of frustrating that this doesn't work like one would hope.
I can auto-create signatures in OWA without a problem using some PowerShell scripting, but they don't work on mobile devices that use the OS's native email app, and I also can't set them automatically to work on clients using Outlook 2007 and later.Anonymous
June 11, 2015
Have you considered using Rocketseed (www.rocketseed.com)? It is compatible with Office365 and has no limits to the number of characters you can use. Also, it always puts the signature and disclaimer into the correct position in the email message.Anonymous
March 28, 2017
Hi All,I want to add a template along with hyperlink signature for all user how to do it.. Please help on thisAnonymous
May 05, 2017
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