david chan's blog

My office uses Microsoft Exchange, and so pretty much everyone there uses Outlook. At the company the marketing department has an email signature guideline for everyone to follow. It’s pretty simple and goes something like this:

Name
Title

Company name – Product division
Contact information
Company website

Making a signature like that from the Create Signature WYSIWYG editor within Outlook was pretty simple. I was sending out emails with that signature in no time at all. However, as people replied or forwarded emails containing my attached signature, it would show up with additional line spacing:

Name

Title

Company name – Product division

Contact information

Company website

The problem is that the WYSIWYG editor saves your signature in HTML with a large amount of unnecessary formatting, which may or may not be kept intact by replies and forwarded emails.

The solution is to get your hands a bit dirty and edit the signature file contents yourself. While this might sound daunting, it’s really just simple HTML. The Outlook signature files are located at:

C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures

In that folder, you will see three versions of your signature, one in *.htm, one in *.rtf, and one in *.txt, each corresponding to one of the three types of emails you can send (HTML, Rich-text and Plain-text).

Go ahead and open the *.htm signature file with notepad. You will immediately notice a slew of HTML tags. Feel free to empty the contents of the file. To achieve the desired signature as outlined in my company’s guideline, I simply entered the following into the file:


<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; color: Black">
Name<br />
Title<br />
<br />
Company name - Product division<br />
Contact information<br />
Company website<br />
</span>


Notice that I controlled exactly how I wanted the line spacing to occur with the <br /> HTML tag. I saved the file and send an email to myself with the modified signature. I forwarded that same email to myself (quoting the first email containing my signature) as a test and saw that the signature formatting has not been altered. The line spacing was exactly how I’ve set it.

Hopefully by editing your own signature manually you can get rid of any unexpected formatting that goes on with your Outlook signature. Of course, if you use non-standard HTML or anything complex then there’s really no guarantee that it will display properly at all.