How to add signatures and disclaimers in Exchange Online

UPDATE February 2016: I’ve written a guest blog piece for Exclaimer comparing this method vs. Exclaimer Cloud – Signatures for Office 365.

For years there have been numerous products on the market for Exchange Server that automatically add signatures to outbound emails.

These products traditionally need to run on the Exchange Server and retrieve information from Active Directory. There is also usually a PC-based console on which to create the signatures and administer the system.

These solutions also exist for Exchange Online in Office 365, however this is also possible without any on-premise systems using native Exchange Online functionality. All it takes is a little bit of reading to understand the variables involved.

Jesper Osgaard wrote a similar piece on his TechNet blog, however in this post I have gone a couple of steps further.

Before starting it is important to have your user information up to date in the Office 365 administration portal. It is assumed that first name & last name are fine, however if you want to automate things such as phone numbers, address details – these need to be present in the user properties.

The first step is to log into the Microsoft Online Portal (https://portal.microsoftonline.com) and select the option to Manage Exchange Online settings.

You’ll then need to select the Mail Control menu option which will open up in the Rules sub-section.

At this point we begin defining our rule. Select the options as per the screenshot below.

Specify the variables you want to use from the following list:

  • DisplayName
  • FirstName
  • Initials
  • LastName
  • Office
  • PhoneNumber
  • OtherPhoneNumber
  • Email
  • Street
  • POBox
  • City
  • State
  • ZipCode
  • Country
  • UserLogonName
  • HomePhoneNumber
  • OtherHomePhoneNumber
  • PagerNumber
  • MobileNumber
  • FaxNumber
  • OtherFaxNumber
  • Notes
  • Title
  • Department
  • Company
  • Manager
  • CustomAttribute1 to CutomAttribute15

This will show up as blank text, however if you have any HTML or CSS skills you can use these to improve the aesthetics. Also linking to graphics such as company logos is supported – however you may find that the recipients company may block calling external files within an email.

Select OK, and the rule is applied immediately.

Here is what the end result looks like:

The problem is if you don’t set an exception – your email signature / disclaimer will be added to each additional reply:

So going back to the Exchange Online rule, open up the signature rule you created and select More Options:

We’re now able to add an exception which allows the rule to be ignored if the email is a reply.

Under the exception menu select The subject includes… and add “RE:” to the field.

Press OK, save the rule, and now we’ll see that the rule isn’t applied on a reply:

Obviously the signature I’ve created in this example is quite plain, so it would be a good idea to get a web designer involved who can write the relevant HTML & CSS to make the signature appear more to your liking.

You now have fully functional automatic signatures! No need to configure Outlook for every new user, and a great way to keep a standard signature across all users.

20 comments

  1. Great post Loryan, thanks.
    However I found I needed to set the condition to “IF the sender is in the scope of…” “Inside the Organisation” rather than “All messages” otherwise Exchange will add the same signature to RECEIVED emails.
    In your example all you’ll get is a “|” at the end of incoming email, but if you add more text or html you’ll see it for sure.

  2. Do you know how to omit a variable from some users? Say some people want to list their cell phone numbers and others do not. Also is there a way to send a text version of the signature if they end user cannot view images and links?

    1. Jennifer for those requirements you might be better off with a 3rd party product dedicated to Exchange signatures, such as Exclaimer or Policy Patrol.

  3. How can you omit some fields from some users…say that everyone doesn’t want to have their cell phone listed?

  4. Hi, how we can set the signature position in reply / forward mails as they are coming in bottom after previous signature instead of after the replayed message body

    1. The signature is being appended, so it will always show up at the bottom.
      You may need to look at a 3rd party solution.

  5. Loryan, congrats!
    I have one last question, can I show this disclaimer at outlook client before sending the email or this disclaimer will be added by exchange online when the email is being sent?

    1. No, unfortunately there is no way to see the signature in Outlook as it’s all done server-side.

  6. Thank you very much for your post…..
    it helps me a lot…. i was experiencing this issue from so long but after following the steps you mentioned here the issue get resolved….

    Thank you.

  7. I did as you wrote. Without an exception. But for some reasons the signature is only added for new mails. Not for mails sent from and replied to external people. Also not if a message is forwarded to external recepients.

    Any ideas why this happen?

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