(1) Disclaimers / Signatures - personal signature in exchange email, footnote

Disclaimers/Signatures

Below you will find a quick guide to creating in CodeTwo Exchange Rules PRO a rule that will be responsible for inserting disclaimers or signatures to messages that meet the defined criteria. You do not need to rely on the good memory of the end user any longer - CodeTwo Exchange Rules PRO will take care of the disclaimers, signature and ad banners in your company without manual prompting.

To create a new rule click Add in the List of rules pane. Next, provide the name for the rule in Add new rule dialog box e.g. Signature and confirm by clicking OK.

The new rule Signature will appear in the List of rules pane while the right pane will show the rule property tabs (Fig.1).

Fig.1. Property tabs for the Signature rule.

The rule tabs i.e. Overview, Conditions, Actions, Exceptions, Options are used to tune how the rule should work. Now you need to perform a few simple steps inside the tabs in order to configure the rule.

Overview. This tab is used to provide a comment describing the rule. Also, it will be updated with data from all remaining tabs while you configure them.

Conditions. In the Conditions tab choose the conditions that will trigger the rule if a message matches the defined criteria. On the Conditions tab click Add and select Scope of senders (Fig.2.). The right pane will show the properties for this condition. As the signature will be added to the messages sent by the group of Administrators you need to click Add and choose Active Directory Group (Fig.3.) and select the Administrator group in the standard Active Directory query dialog box.


Fig.2. Choose Scope of Senders.	Fig.3. Choose Administrators' Group.

Actions. This tab will be used to choose the appropriate action to insert the signature as well as compose its appearance. You need to click Add and select Insert disclaimer/signature (Fig.4.). The right pane will show the action properties (Fig.5.) in which the Edit template button is used to open the Template editor - an editor similar to Microsoft Word.


Fig.4. Choose Insert disclaimer/signature.	Fig.5. Action properties.

The Template editor can be efficiently used to build a professional looking signature or disclaimer containing various HTML characteristics such as advanced text formatting and images. While composing personalized signatures you can make use of Active Directory variables that will get updated with user specific data once the message is processed by Exchange. You need to compose the HTML version of the template as well as Plain Text and RTF. These will be used for the respective message formats. If you fail to compose a template in one of these formats, you may end up with mails missing the signature or template.

Please click the following link to learn more about creating the HTML, plain text and RTF templates.
You can also read more about using the built-in Template Editor.

In the action properties pane of the Insert disclaimer/signature action click Options… to tweak the way the signature/disclaimer is added in the new message/replies and forwards. In the new dialog box that opens (Fig.6.) unselect Do not insert disclaimer/signature if it is already found in the Message in the Bottom signature section and select Insert disclaimer/signature directly under the response text. To confirm th changes click OK. The above configuration will ensure the signature is add to each email, be it a new message, reply and forward.

Fig.6. Option for Insert disclaimer/signature action.

Exceptions. The Exceptions tab is used to define the criteria for the rule that if met by a message should exclude it from processing by the given rule. Because we do not want to define any exceptions, this tab will be empty.

Options. This tab is used to define the settings related to how the program uses the rule. This tab can be left with the default configuration - no modification is needed .

The rule is ready to use. Click Save in the main window of the program to approve all recent changes. Once the rule is saved it begins to operate and all messages sent by the group of Administrator will be stamped by the defined signature.

Click the following link to learn how to create the rule to suppress or force disclaimers by the end user in the email client.