Outlook: standardised corporate email + footer

[Eddie Dane]

Some of my colleagues seem to have unfortunate ideas about how to format an email.

Many have turned on all the bells and whistles, backgrounds and funky fond they could get their hands on.

Some questions:

How do I change my own footer (to make a proposal for management)?

How can I stop others from going nuts with their "designs"?

Do I need a web designer for a professional solution?

Can I use the footers to promote new services etc?

[Little 10 Toes]

Originally Posted by Eddie Dane

How do I change my own footer (to make a proposal for management)?

How can I stop others from going nuts with their "designs"?

Do I need a web designer for a professional solution?

Can I use the footers to promote new services etc?

1) Outlook -> Tools -> Options -> Mail Format -> Signatures (For Outlook 2003. It should be very close to this for other versions)

2) Fire/execute them. (Check with HR first.)

3) No.

4) Yes.

The "footers" are called signatures. For example:

"Bob Smith
Sr. VP
Product Replacement
Global Conspiracy Inc.

This e-mail is blah blah blah....."

is the signature that automatically generates for each e-mail that B.S. sends.

PS: Just kidding about #2. I don't think you need to check with HR.

[Rasmus]

Originally Posted by Eddie Dane

Some of my colleagues seem to have unfortunate ideas about how to format an email.

Many have turned on all the bells and whistles, backgrounds and funky fond they could get their hands on.

Some questions:

How do I change my own footer (to make a proposal for management)?

This will depend on the version of outlook you are using.

Quote:

How can I stop others from going nuts with their "designs"?

Company policy.
I am no expert, but I am not aware of any such settings - and wherever I've worked so far and where outlook was used, we had to install our own footers and settings manually. I am sure it would have been done centrally if there had been a possibility.

Quote:

Do I need a web designer for a professional solution?

I am a purist: e-mails should be text-only. So: No.
But if you are using HTML-mail, it would not be a bad idea to find someone competent to design your footers. (HTML can be tricky, and there is a few other important issues when you try to use HTML in outlook on top of it.)

One place I worked at had set up a simple online script that would take our information and build the HTML file we'd need for the footer from that.

Quote:

Can I use the footers to promote new services etc?

uh .... yes - why should this not be possible? (IOW: I am sure I am not understanding your question correctly, since you can put any text you like in there.)

[Rat]

I understand that there is a way to do this server-side in Exchange, so it can be generated on sending from a template that's filled in with details from the user profiles, but we never got that to work in such a way that the output was what we wanted.

In the end we did it by me creating over a hundred html files and copying them to user machines manually. It's a terrible kludge, but it worked, at least until the marketing people decided they wanted signatures to change every couple of weeks to reflect news.

Anyway, if that's what you're doing, I do recall that funny things can happen if you don't save the html file as UTF-16, and declare it as such in a meta tag. Also, any css styling has to be declared within each element (rather than in a header), and some css will be simply ignored, as will most script.

[Eddie Dane]

Originally Posted by Rat

I understand that there is a way to do this server-side in Exchange, so it can be generated on sending from a template that's filled in with details from the user profiles, but we never got that to work in such a way that the output was what we wanted.

In the end we did it by me creating over a hundred html files and copying them to user machines manually. It's a terrible kludge, but it worked, at least until the marketing people decided they wanted signatures to change every couple of weeks to reflect news.

Anyway, if that's what you're doing, I do recall that funny things can happen if you don't save the html file as UTF-16, and declare it as such in a meta tag. Also, any css styling has to be declared within each element (rather than in a header), and some css will be simply ignored, as will most script.

This is what I meant when I asked if I could use the signatures for promotions. They will change once in a while.

[Rat]

Just for reference, here's what we ended up with, although it's a couple of years out of date, and I obviously removed company information.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-16" />
<title>[company name]</title>
</head>
<body style="font:10pt/12pt Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin:0; padding:0;">
<div style="font:10pt/12pt Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin:0; padding:0;">
<p style="margin-bottom:16px;"><strong>USERNAME</strong>
<span style="font:7pt Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">QUALS</span>
<br />JOBTITLE</p>
<p>
<span style="font:7pt Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">On behalf of</span><br />
<span style="text-transform: uppercase; color: #007189; letter-spacing:2px; margin-bottom:16px;"><strong style="font-weight:450;">[company name]</strong></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:16px;">[address]</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:16px;"><strong>t:</strong> [phone number]<br />
<strong>f:</strong> [fax number<br />
<strong>e:</strong> <a href="mailto:[emailaddress]" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">[emailaddress]</a><br />
<strong>w:</strong> <a href="[website]" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">[website]</a></p>

<div id="legal" style="font-size:11px; color:#afa59c;">
<p style="margin-bottom:16px;">Quality management system to ISO9001:2000</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:16px;">The information contained in this e-mail message is intended only for use of the individual or organisation named above. If you are not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, you should be aware that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. I apologise if you have received this communication in error. Please notify us immediately by telephone on +44 [phonenumber], or by e-mail to <a href="mailto:[emailaddress]" style="color:#afa59c;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none">[emailaddress]</a> and destroy the original message. Thank you for your assistance.</p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

[Wudang]

You might try asking on serverfault.com or one of the other stackexchange websites.

[Rat]

Originally Posted by Eddie Dane

This is what I meant when I asked if I could use the signatures for promotions. They will change once in a while.

Obviously impractical using the method we went for. I insisted that it was just a bad idea and shouldn't be pursued, particularly as they wanted to include images, but they wanted to go ahead anyway.

Anyway, the only 'solution' we could come up with was to use small images that lived on the web server, and when new things come up, swap the images out with identically named ones. Images-as-text is anathema to me, but it would achieve what they wanted, even if all it would do would be to annoy recipients and not appear at all to most of them.

[rjh01]

Originally Posted by Rat

Obviously impractical using the method we went for. I insisted that it was just a bad idea and shouldn't be pursued, particularly as they wanted to include images, but they wanted to go ahead anyway.

Anyway, the only 'solution' we could come up with was to use small images that lived on the web server, and when new things come up, swap the images out with identically named ones. Images-as-text is anathema to me, but it would achieve what they wanted, even if all it would do would be to annoy recipients and not appear at all to most of them.

Problem with that is that the images might not be downloaded with the rest of the e-mail.

To amend a signature in Outlook 2010
1. Click the File tab
2. Click the options. A dialogue box will open.
3. Click on Mail
4. Click on Signatures
5. Modify the dialogue box as required.

[Rat]

Originally Posted by rjh01

Problem with that is that the images might not be downloaded with the rest of the e-mail.

To amend a signature in Outlook 2010
1. Click the File tab
2. Click the options. A dialogue box will open.
3. Click on Mail
4. Click on Signatures
5. Modify the dialogue box as required.

Yes, I know. That was rather the point of my objection to it, or at least partly, and I said so. Embedding the images within the email, rather than linking them, was something we experimented with quite a lot. The outcome was not good, as well as obviously increasing the size of each email considerably.

The method you outline is absolutely the right one for an individual who wants to change his signature. In a workplace with more than a handful of users, it's even more cumbersome than the bodge that I used. Also, I haven't tried with 2010, but even in 2007 Outlook used Word as the editor for emails, and a similar method for signatures, so signatures created with that method will generate some very ugly html.