One of the long-standing end user complaints with Exchange Server and Exchange Online is managing email signatures. These days, our end users can use Outlook (desktop), Outlook (mobile), and Outlook (on the web, aka OWA) to access their email. And that’s not mentioning third party clients as well, such as the iOS mail app.
Each Outlook client has its own email signature settings. And to make matters worse, each time a new email profile is created the signature needs to be recreated as well. The only persistent email signature is the one stored in OWA, but that signature is not utilized by other Outlook clients.
Exchange’s own native capabilities to insert email signatures using mail flow rules is quite limited, and often less desirable than just letting end users manually deal with it. This problem is so common that a healthy ecosystem of third party solutions evolved over the years, with products from the likes of Exclaimer and CodeTwo filling the need.
But perhaps there is now hope for the organizations who don’t have the budget for third party solutions. As Jeff Guillet writes:
In a recent discussion with the Exchange and Outlook product groups, the MVPs discussed a long-standing request – to store email signatures in the user’s mailbox. Doing so will provide a centralized place to store and retrieve the signatures and provide consistency for the email clients that consume them (Outlook for desktop, Outlook on the web (OWA), and the Outlook apps (iOS and Android)). We are also requesting that signatures can be managed via PowerShell.
The product groups challenged us to show that customers want this by vote count on UserVoice. Please vote for the “Store Signatures in the mailbox” idea on UserVoice website to make your voice heard. I’ve written a spec for this feature, which I will be submitting to the PGs once the vote count gets higher. Our expectation is that this will work for both Exchange Server and Exchange Online.
It’s heartening to see that Microsoft is open to the idea. They are obviously aware that this is something customers want. But development resources are applied to the solving the biggest problems, or working on the most in-demand features. For this particular request to get traction, it’s going to take a lot of interest from the community.
In other words, your vote is important!
So if you believe that Exchange should have better email signature capabilities, please go to UserVoice and add your vote.
I have found out that the routing of emails via systems like Codetwo and Exclaimer for email signatures breaks Exchange message recalls when trying to recall emails from an internal Exchange online recipient. I tried the solution supplied by CodeTwo, which does not work.
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From the Code Two people:
The workaround is explained here: https://www.codetwo.com/kb/configuring-tnef-conversion-options/#powershell. You’re right about the cause of the problem and it is required to change TNEF conversion options for remote domains to fix it. The key is to do that for all domains Dennis is using to send emails – that might be the missing piece.
Code Two say that you can contact them if you’re still having problems…
is there any news on this topic?
I’m just another person walking this planet frustrated with the fact that e-mail signatures aren’t easily managed centrally for all possible devices.
It’s 2020.
I mean – it’s t w e n t y t w e n t y …
I’m looking for this capability right now – I set up everyone’s OWA signature without realizing it wouldn’t work in outlook
i assign the signature for my company user using office 365 exchange.that signature works when he sends email from outlook desktop application. but when user uses outlook web. there are two email signatures under email.
the issue is i want same signature while user send email from outlook desktop application or outlook web application,
can any body help me to resolve this problem,waiting for your kind response.
thank you.
Not sure if you ever got this sorted, but you need to remove the users ability to create their own signature. It sounds like they are adding their own in OWA on top of your exchange signature.
Great article. However, none of those 3rd party solutions in the article have pricing for a single user, and I believe there are many single users of Office 365 (such as myself). That is just one more reason why it would be great if signatures *could* eventually be stored on the Exchange server natively. Also, the link for the specific idea on User Voice in the article seems to be broken?…..it just says “This idea is awaiting moderator approval.” I’d love to vote for that idea, if I can find the idea on User Voice! Thanks!
Having exchange online for a small business makes a lot of sense, but not being able to manage signatures, if not through a disclaimer workaround which does not propagate to Outlook or OWA is a disappointment.
If he external vendors had a reasonable pricing for just signatures I would use them, but as of now it’s not something worth considering.
Some of my clients cant afford Exclaimer of Code2. The price sometimes defeats the savings in migrating them to Exchange Online not to mention is another vendor, app documentation and support skills to bring onboard.
Yeah I’d love this too. We currently use CodeTwo and it works but something that works natively would be much better. I find the way MS is working at the moment quite frustrating. There’s tons of interesting apps released (new ones all the time) but the )365 ecosystem feels like it lacks focus.
Take Teams. It’s mooted to be a replacement for S4B but MS doesn’t appear to be interested in feature parity.
So it’s great that MS is interested in improving signatures in Exchange (it’s LONG over due) but I’d also like to see a tighter focus.
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