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
Probably the easiest way is to take some unique text from the disclaimer and use that instead of the RE: suggestion. #justathought
technet.microsoft.com/.../exchange-online-service-description.aspx
and Yes
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 email
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.
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. Cheers
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 http://www.mail-signatures.com
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
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.
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!
@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 David
Just FYI, I checked out the tird party tool from: http://www.mail-signatures.com and it inly works for OWA and Windows Outlook; not Mac and not Mobile.
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
Peggy
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,
Liam
@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.
Chris, we would apreciate very much if you could post the code.
Thanks in advance.
I'll give Chris Howett's solution a try. I'll post it here if I manage to nail it. Wish me luck!
Is this solution relevant anymore? I can not even find 'Mail Control' in the current Office 365 Exchange admin center.
Any luck with this powershell method of adding signatures? Chris, can you post some code please?
Hi Chris...Can you please post the code to help us to do.
Hi Chris, please shed light for us. Thanks.
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.
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.
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 - http://www.impactia.com) and it's a much better fit to our needs. We're also using some of their
advanced features (mobile, etc).
This is a disclaimer, and completely 100% utterly useless as a signature.
This works beautifully for us.
Try a third party tool - Crossware Mail Signature - http://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.
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.
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 ..
hi,
is it possible to add an image in the disclaimer. when we use a link to an image outlook and OWA block this.
Is there away to add a field with phone numbers globally? Just like the %%First Name%% and %%Last Name%%?
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.
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.
Hi All,
I want to add a template along with hyperlink signature for all user how to do it.. Please help on this
Sadly this approach is unusable for html signatures.
It works until a user sends an email in plain text (e.g. from an iOS device like an iPhone or iPad). The html is stripped from the signature leaving a complete mess. There doesn't appear to be any option to only apply the rule to html messages, or convert the mail to html before appending the signature.
Somebody needs to tell the Exchange Online team about this problem - html signatures that work out of the box are such a basic function for enterprise email. Having to get clients to copy/paste into their devices is just agony!
A simple option on the rule to convert the message to html would resolve the problem - or allow rules to be targeted to message type (e.g. one rule for plain text another for html).