Outlook Signatures

Personalize emails in style with signatures on your emails.

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Outlook signatures are a wonderful way to personalize emails. Outlook Signatures are blocks of text or graphic that appears at the end of outgoing messages. As it literally means, a signature basically consists of your name used to signoff the email and can contain optional contact information, text or images

You can configure Outlook to automatically add signature to message or you can add the required signature manually.

Most of us have several ‘hats’ in our life. There’s work and personal but there can be others such as a member or organizer for a group. Outlook lets you create as many signatures as you desire to suit all these facets of your life. .

How to Create a Signature

Signatures can be created in different formats and it can contain various elements. A basic signature will have just the sender’s name. Along with the name you can include acknowledgments like “Thank you”, “Yours Lovingly”, etc. Official or business signatures will have company name, contact number, company address, website URL, etc. Company logo or any other relevant graphic can also be used. Any text in the signature can be hyperlinked. Sometimes electronic business card or scanned signature is also used. The text of the signature can be formatted to make it more attractive. Occasionally signature will also contain disclaimer blocks like stating, "If you are not the intended recipient of the e-mail then you should delete the e-mail".

Make a simple signature

Open Outlook
Click Tools | Options | Mail Format | Signatures…

Outlook Tools Options menu

Outlook - Tools Options Mail Format dialog
In the Signatures and Stationary window click New.

Outlook - New Signature window
In the pop-up window type a name to identify the signature e.g. Personal and click the OK button.

Outlook - New signature name
In the “Edit Signature” text box type the desired text for the signature e.g.
Thank You, Fred

Outlook - choose default signature
Before you click the OK button to save the signature you can associate this signature to any mail id in Outlook. Under “Choose default signature” select the desired email account to associate the signature. If you have only one email account then by default the signature will be associated to that email id.
Now click on OK button. Click the OK button again on the Options window.

You have successfully created a signature.

Now if you open a new message you can find the signature in the body of the message.

Outlook - Account selection in new message

Note: There is also another way to open the Signature and stationary window to create signature. For this open a new message in Outlook.

Under Message | Include | Signature click “Signatures...”.

Outlook 2007 - Signature selection from ribbon

The Signature and stationary window opens and the same steps as explained above should be followed to create the signature.

Add signature to message

There are two ways to add signature to message. Signature can be automatically added to all new outgoing messages or you can add signature manually to individual messages. Signatures can be added to Replies/Forward messages. This can also be added either automatically or manually.

To add signatures automatically to all outgoing messages Click Tools | Options | Mail Format | Signatures…

Select the signature which you would like to add in the message e.g. Personal. Under “New messages” dropdown list select the signature “Personal”. If required for the “Replies/forward” dropdown list select the required signature e.g. Personal.

Outlook - select signature for replies and forwards

If you do not wish the signatures to be automatically added to all outgoing and Replies/forward messages then in the dropdown list choose the “none” option.

Note: Alternatively you can make the above mentioned changes by opening a new message and clicking on the Signature link in the Include tab.

To add signatures manually to new outgoing message or reply/forward messages open the message and under Message | Include | Signature select the created signature e.g. Personal. The selected signature will be inserted in the message.

Outlook - select signature from ribbon

If you wish to retain the feature of signature being added automatically to messages but prefer to do away with it in certain messages then simply select the signature in the message body and press the DELETE button.

Now let's create a signature for business purpose

Open Outlook
Click Tools | Options | Mail Format | Signatures…
In the Signatures and Stationary window click New.
In the pop-up window type a name to identify the signature e.g. Business and click the OK button.

Outlook - naming a business signature
In the “Edit Signature” text box type the desired text for the signature. You can also format the text like making it Bold or changing the font color or even changing the alignment.
In the example shown for Business signature an image of the company logo has been inserted and also URL of the company website is given. There is option in the edit box to add pictures, hyperlinks and Business card.

Outlook - signatures dialog with business card option
Click on OK button. Click the OK button again on the Options window.

Now if you open a new message you can see the Business signature which you just created in the body of the message.

Outlook - business signature in a new email

You may wonder what a Business card is all about. A Business card or Electronic Business card is a .vcf file which contains your contact information. You can create a .vcf file based on the contact information you have stored in the address book. This file can be inserted in the signature and it is displayed in the signature as a Business card. Your mail recipients can add your contact information easily to their address book through the Business card.

Select a Signature

We have now created two different signatures. One called “Personal” and the other “Business”. This way we can create any number of signatures for various purposes. We can associate each of these signatures to different email accounts as already explained above. We can also associate all the signatures to the same Email id. You have the freedom to link specific signatures to specific messages.

You can choose the required signature manually when you compose a new message or you can instruct Outlook to insert specific signatures to outgoing messages and Replies/forward messages.

To select signature manually, open a new message. While creating a signature if you have selected any signature to appear automatically in all new messages then that particular signature will appear in the body of the message. If a signature is already appearing in the message then right click on the signature and you can see different signatures available. Select one of them and it will be inserted accordingly. In the below screenshot the checkmark on the signature “Business” indicates that currently that particular signature is inserted in the message.

Outlook - change signatures inside a message

Another method to choose required signature is to open a new message and assume that no default signature has been selected to appear automatically. Hence the message will be blank. Now under Message | Include | Signature you can see the list of signatures that are available. Select one of them and it will be inserted in the message.

Outlook - select signature from ribbon

This way you can create multiple signatures and easily associate any of them with the message.

Make changes to the Signature

If you wish to edit any of the signatures then you can either do it individually in the message itself or you can modify the signature such that it is applicable to all the messages by default. To edit the signature in individual messages, open a new message, select desired signature and make the required changes.

Outlook - using mini-toolbar while formatting a signature

In the above screenshot the text style and color is changed. You can even add additional text to the signature or add any image like company logo. But changes made to the signature in this manner will be applicable only to the current message.

To edit signature such that the change is applicable for all messages click Tools | Options | Mail Format | Signature. In the “Signatures and Stationary” window select the required signature and make the changes in the edit box. Click OK button. If you wish to make changes to more than one signature then click the “Save” button after making changes to one signature. You can even modify the name given to identify each signature by clicking the “Rename” button.

Outlook - Save or Rename a signature

Alternatively you can access the “Signatures and Stationary” window by opening a new message and selecting Message | Include | Signature | Signatures…

Note

Now as most of the mobiles are linked to email services like Outlook, Yahoo and Gmail it makes sense to insert a signature in the mobile message also. For this, first you need to create the signature in Outlook as already explained above and then link this signature to the Outlook mobile service account. This way each time you compose a new message in your mobile the signature will be inserted in the message. This applies to Replies/forward messages as well.

Article posted: Thursday, 08 October 2009