Possibly the biggest surprise brought about by the release of Exchange 2016 is… how similar it is to Exchange 2013. In fact, in terms of email signature management it’s pretty much identical (if you’re familiar with the 2013 version of Microsoft’s email server, you’ll see what I mean). However, many of you may have never had the opportunity to poke around Exchange 2013, so let’s get to work:
NOTE: This solution comes with several limitations, which I discuss in the last section of the article.
Exchange 2007 was the first edition of Microsoft’s messaging platform to introduce Hub Transport rules and with them a built-in append disclaimer action. The options available in this action are very basic, the most important limitation being lack of support for dynamic Active Directory fields (see this article for more). Due to this, the action can only be used for creating automatic disclaimers (legal, financial, etc.) and general company signatures without users’ details.
Once you have the Hub Transport role installed on your Exchange 2007 server you can start working on automatic disclaimers for your organization.
Fig. 1. Creating a new transport rule on Exchange 2007.
Access your Exchange admin center. To do this open an internet browser and in the address bar type:
https://localhost/ecp or https://<CASServerName>/ecp
(where <CASServerName> is your Client Access Server computer name) and log in using domain Administrator credentials.
Go to mail flow, rules to arrive at the Exchange 2013 transport rules’ editor.
In this article I explain how to set up a company-wide email signature using Exchange 2010 Transport Rules in 7 steps. Note that this method has its limitations, such as not displaying the signature in users’ Sent Items folders and no way to add the signature under latest messages in email chains (learn more…).
