What Are You Using to Manage Email Signatures, and What Does It Cost?

For smaller teams, we keep it simple: provide an approved signature template during onboarding, have employees fill in their details, and make their manager responsible for checking compliance. It costs almost nothing and works well when different departments need slightly different signature variations.

For a 40–50 person organization, we generate signatures from a Word template that pulls staff names, roles, and phone numbers from an Excel file. We send instructions for saving the result in Outlook and avoid paying for a dedicated management product.

We’ve handled this with automation rather than a commercial service. A PowerShell process pulls employee information from Active Directory and generates Outlook signature files in HTML, RTF, and TXT formats. Another scheduled process updates signatures for New Outlook and Outlook on the web using mailbox configuration settings. A similar setup can use Azure Automation to generate the files and place them in each user’s OneDrive folder, while a client-side scheduled task keeps classic Outlook synchronized. The main caveat is that roaming signatures need to be disabled because they aren’t currently straightforward to automate.

We’ve used CodeTwo for several years. Our current cost is roughly $3,000 per year for 300 users, and the service is fully SaaS. We deploy the Outlook add-in through the Microsoft 365 admin center, while the signature rules and configuration are managed in the CodeTwo portal.

We use an on-premises mail gateway to handle filtering, file conversion, S/MIME, DKIM, and centralized disclaimers or signatures. Keeping signatures at the gateway has been less troublesome than running a separate product, particularly for organizations with strict compliance or government-cloud requirements. We previously used a cloud signature service, but its move to a cloud-only model didn’t suit our environment.