Logo email signatures without attaching or embedding!

December 24, 2008 · 10 comments   in Email, Internet

This article will explain how to make a logo signature in Outlook Express (for Windows) and Mail (for Macintosh).

Reasons to do this

  • It looks nice to have your logo in your signature
  • Hosting your logo “on-line” (as opposed to making it part of your email) won’t create an attachment when you send an email to someone. You have less chance of getting hung in their spam filters and they won’t get confused by extra attachments.
  • Emails without embedded logos are smaller and take up less room in someone’s inbox.
  • If you decide to change your logo, you can do it on your end and everyone else’s email with your signature will reflect the change.

You will need:

  • Your logo uploaded to the internet and the path to it. 
    EXAMPLE. See how when clicking the sample you only get the logo and nothing else? Note the URL (http://www.lenashore.com/studiometry/Web-Logo-stamp-2008-tiger.jpg). That is the full path to the image and the link you will need.
  • A basic text program (i.e. Text Edit, Notepad) or HTML program.
  • My sample code. [Download code here]

The end result will look like what you see below. But you will alter it to include your logo and information.

Email Sample

Windows Instructions (for Outlook)

  1. [Download the code here]
  2. Unzip the file
  3. Open the email_signature.html file with notepad or other text or HTML editing software.
  4. Edit to reflect your company information. 
  5. Replace http://www.lenashore.com/studiometry/Web-Logo-stamp-2008-tiger.jpg with the path to your own graphic.
  6. Save your file.
  7. Open Outlook Express. Go to Tools –> Options –> Signatures (tab)
  8. Create a new signature by selecting “New”
  9. Check the “file” radio button.
  10. Browse to the file you just saved.
  11. Select “okay”

Macintosh Instructions (for Mail)

Mail is a little trickier but, not hard once you understand how to do it.

  1. [Download the code here]
  2. Unzip the file
  3. Open the email_signature.html file with notepad or other text or HTML editing software.
  4. Edit to reflect your company information. 
  5. Replace http://www.lenashore.com/studiometry/Web-Logo-stamp-2008-tiger.jpg with the path to your own graphic.
  6. Save your file.
  7. Open your revised signature file with Safari and save it as a webarchive someplace on your computer.
  8. Open Mail and go to Preferences–>Signatures
  9. Create a new signature by clicking the plus sign in the middle column. (Don’t worry about editing this as we are going to replace this with our new signature.) You can close this window.
  10. Now, go to your home folder –>Library –> Mail –> Signatures
  11. You will notice that any signatures you have in this folder  have crazy looking names like “1CF6A404-88B6-484F-A69E-69897A0C2885.webarchive”
  12. Locate the signature file you just created. If you have multiple signatures, check the date to determine which one you just created.
  13. Copy the crazy name of the signature file.
  14. Find your email_signature.html file and rename it exactly as it appears in step 12. 
  15. Replace your the signature file with the newly named email_signature.html file of the same name. It will ask you if you want to replace the file. Tell it yes.

Options

You can use this same method to create a wide variety of styles for your signatures. This is just one example. If you have access to an HTML program you can use that to see what you are doing. Just remember you don’t need the body tags or the header information for a signature.

Happy signing!

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My Two Cents » Blog Archive » Spruce Up Your Signature in Outlook Express
February 9, 2009 at 6:26 am

{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Siva January 3, 2009 at 5:29 am

I am using windows XP. I have configured Outlook express version 6 signature using the above stated method. I have a logo in our website. Even though the mails from which I send from Out look express shows an attachment in REDIFFMAIL, GMAIL etc… Pls help…

Reply

2 Lena January 3, 2009 at 10:03 am

Siva – can you post or email your code to me? I’ll take a look. :cheerful:

Reply

3 Lena January 4, 2009 at 7:10 am

@Siva: I took a look at your code. Thanks for the email.

I probably buried this bit of information too far down in my post, but it is important. You need to strip out the HEAD and META content of your signature. You just want the code for the signature and nothing extra. Since you aren’t using the BODY tag, you should strip that too.

If you’ll look at my code, you’ll see there is not “extra” information. You don’t want to create a full HTML page. Just a little snippet for your signature.

Delete lines 1-15 (this is where you extra code is) and the closing tags on line 97. Line 21 has a rogue closing FONT tag.

You might want to run the code that is left through a HTML validator to catch anything else. It won’t understand why you don’t have body tags – but it will be helpful to find other problems. W3 has a good one here: http://validator.w3.org/

:smile:

Reply

4 David February 5, 2009 at 12:53 pm

Lena, love your site and thanks for this tip.

Unfortunately, when I simply double click your email_signature.html file, I get an page that shows your signature, but no logo. Any ideas?

Reply

5 Lena February 5, 2009 at 2:38 pm

@David

Thanks for the kudos.

I bet you are using Internet Explorer to view the html. I have no problems viewing the image in other browsers – but was able to replicate your problem when I tried it in IE. If you look at the source code and copy/paste the path in a new window it shows up. I suspect it is because it is not a full HTML page with body tags, etc. I think other browsers make allowances for that, but not IE.

Just open the file in notepad or other text editor and continue as normal. When it is used in a mail program, it should display just fine. :biggrin:

Reply

6 Harro February 5, 2009 at 4:46 pm

Thanks. It just pointed me in the right direction. Necessary because our logo (embedded as a file) caused messages to got stuck in spam filters.

Reply

7 Dorothy November 18, 2009 at 12:20 pm

When I go to the Mail folder on my hard drive there is no Signature folder within. So I’m stuck on Step 10 for your Mac instructions.

Can you help?

Thanks, Dorothy

Reply

8 Lena November 18, 2009 at 12:54 pm

Are you sure you successfully created a new default signature as in step 9? It’s possible if you have no signatures there may not be a folder for them yet. Perhaps it didn’t take when you created it? What version of OSX are you using?

Reply

9 Marcus Stringer November 30, 2009 at 5:01 pm

@Dorothy…
You need to goto Users>computername>library>mail>Signatures

Reply

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