When you write letters to other people you put your signature at the bottom. You can also add a signature to all your emails before sending.
Whether you use free webmails such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc or you use POP3 based emails such as the one provided by your internet service provider, you can add your signature to the email you send using these email services.
Generally as far as emails are concerned, a signature doesn’t refer to your personal signature that you put on your cheques. Instead an email signature refers to your name, address, phone numbers and other contact details that you want to add.
Here let us see the steps to add a signature to emails in MS Outlook or Outlook Express
To create a signature and to make changes to an already created signature outlook has options. You can configure outlook to add signatures below every email that you send using outlook or only for specific emails.
You can also create multiple signatures. For example one signature for office use, one signature for friends and another for family etc. For this, you should have many email accounts.
You can even put your signature in a text file or an HTML file and configure outlook to use this file as signature. A text file can only contain text information where as an HTML file can include images, your photo, your company’s logo or a scanned image of your original signature or a bigger font etc. So using HTML file is the best way to include signatures.
How to create signature?
  1. Open Outlook Express or MS Outlook. Click on ‘Tools->Options’. Select the ‘Signatures’ tab and click on ‘New’ button.
  2. In the ‘Edit Signature’ section the ‘Text’ option will be selected by default. In that box, you can key in your signature details.
  3. If your signature in a text file or an HTML file then select the ‘File’ radio button and click on ‘Browse’ button’ to select the signature file.
  4. Now select the ‘Add Signature to all outgoing message’ checkbox and click on ‘OK’.
To use different signature for different email accounts
  1. First, create many signatures as mentioned in the above paragraph.
  2. Open outlook and click ‘Tools->Options’ and select the ‘Signature’ tab.
  3. select the first signature in the list and click on ‘Advanced’ button then select the email account that should use that signature and click on ‘OK’.
  4. Follow the same step again to configure your other signatures for other accounts.
To add signature only to specific emails
  1. Outlook will usually add the signature to all the outgoing emails without asking you. If you do not want to attach the signature to all emails then select ‘Tools->Options’ and select ‘Signature’ tab.
  2. Now remove the check box in ‘Add Signatures to all outgoing message’ option and click ‘OK’.
  3. From now on whenever you send emails the signatures will not be inserted automatically.
  4. To insert signature to specific emails just click on ‘Insert->Signature’ menu option and select which signature you want to insert.
To add your REAL signature in emails
  1. In a blank white paper put your real signature. Then use your scanner to scan the signature and save it as an image. For example you can save it as a sig.jpg file.
  2. Let us assume that you have saved your signature image as ‘sig.jpg’ and saved under ‘c:\myfiles’ folder.
  3. Now you have to create an HTML file for your signature. To create an HTML file for your signature open your Notepad application. And type the following.



  4. Now save the file by choosing ‘File->Save’ in notepad. Save the file as “mysign.htm”. Note that your filename should be between two double inverted commas. If you do not use the double inverted commas then notepad will save your file as misigh.htm.txt
  5. Now open outlook and select ‘Tools->Options’ and click on ‘Signature’ tab.
  6. Now select the ‘File’ radio button and click on ‘Browse’ button and select teh mysign.htm file.
  7. Click ‘OK’ and then check the ‘Add signatures to all outgoing message’ and then click ‘OK’ again.
  8. Now your real signature will be added to the bottom of each email you send.