Adding disclaimers
 User's Manual Start Page
General info
Personalized disclaimers
Disclaimers containing images
Reply and forward options
International encoding support
RTF (TNEF) messages handling

General info

In the current version of CodeTwo Exchange Rules you can define one type of rules - adding disclaimers to outgoing messages. Disclaimers are added only to the messages sent outside the Exchange organization, they are not added to the internal messages sent between users belonging to the same organization. If a message is sent to multiple recipients, who are both internal and external network users, the external recipients will receive the message with a disclaimer added, while internal recipients will receive the message without the disclaimer.

Disclaimers are added to messages sent from all e-mail clients: Outlook, OWA, OMA, BlackBerry, SMTP clients and others.

Disclaimers are not added to encrypted and signed messages.

Disclaimers added to the messages by a specific rule are chosen from the Choice of disclaimer dialog (pic.1). Choose the location of the files containing the disclaimer you want to use. The plain non-formatted text and the HTML disclaimers are chosen separately. The plain text disclaimer is added only to the messages sent in the plain text format, while the HTML-formatted disclaimer is added only to the messages sent in the HTML format.

Defining files containing disclaimers
Pic.1. Selecting the files containing disclaimers.


Personalized disclaimers

Disclaimers can contain special variables, which allow creating personalized disclaimers, i.e. disclaimers containing the sender's personal information. If a disclaimer contains variables, before adding it to the message, all variables will be dynamically replaced with the appropriate values, retrieved from the Active Directory database for that user - the sender of the message.

Variables in the disclaimer should be entered in square brackets. For instance, the [First name] text is a variable and will be replaced with the first name of the message sender, the [Last name] variable - with the last name, and [E-mail] - with the e-mail address of the user, sending the message.

An example of a personalized plain text-formatted disclaimer: An example of the disclaimer added by the program to an outgoing message: 
-- 
Best regards,
[First name] [Last name]
[Department]
[Company]
phone: [Phone]
mobile: [Mobile]
e-mail: [E-mail]

------------------------------------
Emails belong on computers, trees 
belong in forests; if you must print
this, do it on recycled paper.
------------------------------------

-- 
Best regards,
John Doe
Development
CodeTwo
phone: 555-344-234
mobile: 555-234-876
e-mail: j.doe@codetwo.com

------------------------------------
Emails belong on computers, trees 
belong in forests; if you must print
this, do it on recycled paper.
------------------------------------

Examples of personalized disclaimers are available in the "Templates" directory in the program installation folder.

The table below contains the full list of variables that may be used in disclaimers. Each variable corresponds to a specific value in the Active Directory database. The table has been divided into sections, representing tabs in the user properties of the Active Directory Users and Computers console.

General tab
[First name]
[Last name]
[Initials]
[Display name]
[Description]
[Office]
[Phone]
[E-mail]
[Web page]
Address tab
[Street]
[P.O. Box]
[City]
[State]
[Postal code]
[Country]
Telephones tab
[Home phone]
[Pager]
[Mobile]
[Fax]
[IP phone]
Organization tab
[Title]
[Department]
[Company]
Exchange Advanced tab
(Exchange Custom Attributes, extensionAttribute1 - extensionAttribute15)
[ExchAttr1]
[ExchAttr2]
...
[ExchAttr15]



Disclaimers containing images

You can insert images into disclaimers. An example of such disclaimer can be found in the "personal+image.html" file, located in the "Templates" folder of the program installation directory.

When inserting a picture into an HTML disclaimer, use relative or absolute path to the picture file. The file should be located on a local disk, not necessarily in the same folder the HTML disclaimer is located. Supported image types are: JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP. The BMP files are very large and therefore you should avoid using them. When CodeTwo Exchange Rules inserts a disclaimer containing images into an email message, it attaches images to the message as hidden attachments, which are sent together with that message. Thanks to that, images will always be visible on the recipient's side.

Below you can see a few examples of HTML disclaimers containing images:

An image inserted using
a relative path 
...
<img src="../images/logo.gif">
...
An image inserted using
an absolute path 
...
<img src="c:\my pictures\logo.gif">
...
An image inserted as
a table background 
...
<table width=200 background="images/logo.gif">
...
An image inserted as
a table cell background 
...
<table width=200 border=1>
<td valign=top background="../../logo.gif">
...

You can only insert images into disclaimers using one of the above methods. You cannot insert an image using the CSS background or background-image attributes: 
...
<table width=200 style="backgound-image: url(../images/logo.gif)">
...
In that case the image will not be recognized by CodeTwo Exchange Rules and will not be added to the message.

On pic.2 you can see an example of a disclaimer containing a logo as it is seen by the recipient of a message.

An example of a message with a disclaimer containing a logo
Pic.2. An example of a message with a disclaimer containing a logo.



Reply and forward options

When two or more people correspond via email, they send it a few times to each other using the Reply function in their email client. Usually the entire conversation is kept in the message and in every response new text is added at the top. In that case a question arises, where a disclaimer should be inserted into the message. You can define the insertion point using the Reply and forward options property page (pic.3).

The Reply and forward options property page
Pic.3. The "Reply and forward options" property page.

If you want a disclaimer to act as a personal signature for each user, then you need to select the Insert disclaimer directly under the response text option and uncheck the Do not insert disclaimer if it already exists option. In such configuration, the disclaimer will always be inserted directly under the response text, rather than at the end of the message.

On the other hand, if a disclaimer is a legal statement (sometimes quite long) that must be added to email messages sent by your company, then you will probably want to select the Insert disclaimer at the end of the message option and check the Do not insert disclaimer if it already exists option. In such configuration the disclaimer will be appended to the end of the message, but will not be added if it already exists. Even if users reply to a message multiple times, there will only be one company disclaimer at the bottom of the entire conversation.


International encoding support

When defining a new rule, the file containing the disclaimer you want to add to a message is identified. Because messages can be encoded using various regional settings, it is recommended that the files with disclaimers use UTF-8 or Unicode encoding. A UTF-8 or Unicode file can be created even using the simplest text editor, Notepad for instance. If the file with a disclaimer is not UTF-8 or Unicode-encoded, regional characters may display incorrectly on the recipient's machine.

If messages in non-standard encoding, such as Russian or Chinese, are sent via Exchange Server, relevant codepages have to be installed on the server to enable adding disclaimers to messages correctly.

If you send messages from Microsoft Outlook, make sure that the Auto select encoding for outgoing messages option in the settings is cleared. If the option is checked and a user writes an e-mail that does not contain national characters, the message will be sent by Outlook in a 7-bit encoding US-ASCII. CodeTwo Exchange Rules does not convert original message encoding and therefore national characters used in a disclaimer will not be displayed at the recipient - because they do not belong to a set of US-ASCII encoding characters.

In order to configure encoding, follow the steps described below:
1. In Microsoft Outlook menu choose Tools | Options | Mail Format | International Options.
2. The dialog as on pic.4 will be displayed. Clear the Auto select encoding for outgoing messages option.
3. In the Preferred encoding for outgoing messages box select the encoding for outgoing messages, appropriate for your country. You should select the ISO encoding rather than the Windows encoding.

Correct configuration of encoding choice in Microsoft Outlook
Pic.4. Correct encoding configuration in Microsoft Outlook.


RTF (TNEF) messages handling

If e-mail messages are sent outside the organization in RTF (to be more precise in TNEF - Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format), a disclaimer is added only to the MIME part that is a representation of the message in the plain text format. Usually messages in TNEF consist of the "text/plain" MIME part type that contains a text of the message in a plain text format and an "application/ms-tnef" part that contains the "winmail.dat" attachment, representing the message in the original RTF. If the recipient of the message sent in RTF uses Microsoft Outlook, he will see the message in its original RTF format without the disclaimer. However, if he uses another e-mail client, he will see a representation of the message in the plain text format with the disclaimer added by the CodeTwo Exchange Rules program.

E-mails are sent outside the organization in the RTF format very rarely. If a user writes an RTF message in Outlook and sends it to an external address, Outlook will transform it to HTML by default (although the option may be disabled to prevent Outlook from transforming the message format) and a disclaimer will be added to such message.

If as an administrator you want to make sure that messages in RTF are never sent outside via Exchange Server, take the following steps:
1. Run the Exchange System Manager program.
2. In the left panel go to Global Settings | Internet Message Formats | Standard.
3. In the context menu choose Properties and go to the Advanced tab.
4. Set the Exchange rich-text format option into Never use (pic.5).

After configuring the Exchange server the above way, messages sent by users in RTF will be converted into HTML by the server.

Exchange server configuration preventing sending messages in the RTF format. RTF messages will be converted to HTML by the server.
Pic.5. Exchange server configuration preventing sending messages in the RTF format. RTF messages will be converted to HTML by the server.