Managing email signatures across the domain

At Bluhalo we needed a solution to inconsistency between employees email signatures. Every time our designers came up with a new email signature for us to use they would need to produce a separate GIF or JPEG for every employee, and then someone in HTML would have to build the signature and email it to everyone to add into Outlook. This was rather cumbersome and often meant changes to signatures spanned over a couple of days as people didn’t make the change, or people were away so couldn’t make the change. On top of that, if an email went out from webmail or a blackberry, it got no signature at all, or a basic text only signature at best!

To get round this I installed a piece of software called Exclaimer Mail Utilities on our Exchange 2003 server that parses all incoming and outgoing email and allows you to apply various rules to them. One of the best features in Exclaimer is the “Disclaimer” rule.

This rule allows you to edit the email passing through the system in a similar way to doing a mail merge. You can build a template of how you’d like your email to look when it goes out by using fields to insert data. There’s a very comprehensive list of fields to choose from, complete with embedding names, telephone numbers, etc from Active Directory.

 

The flexibility is immediately obvious. With this rule alone we can:

• Completely re-brand every users email signature with one edit
• Add Marketing content to emails such as countdowns to events, current news, etc
• Keep emails clean that route to special locations, such as PGP emails or certain clients/suppliers.
• Brand emails from any device such as Blackberry’s through BES, Windows Mobile Devices, Outlook Web Access, etc

I believe this is one of the best addons for Microsoft Exchange I have seen so far. As well as the disclaimer rules, you also get:

• Comprehensive Anti-Spam
• Complex auto-responders
• Mail blocking and redirection
• Any other rule you can think of!