An email signature from your card
How to make one, what a company can add to everybody's, and the two limits worth knowing before you paste.
Signature analytics
With the Signatures add-on, on Business and Enterprise, Signatures has an Analytics button. It shows what a signature did once it left: emails signed, emails opened, taps on its links, who the email went to and which conversation it belonged to. The tabs are Summary, Conversations, Signatures, People, Links, Recipients, Geography, Devices & mail clients, Time Analysis and Individual events, and one row of filters (dates, signature, sender, recipient's domain) narrows all of them.
Taps are exact. Every web link, banner and icon in a signature is replaced by a tracked address that sends the reader straight on to the original; email and phone links are left alone. A tap counts toward your plan's monthly scans, and a link keeps working when the allowance is used up. Your administrators are told when 75% of it is gone and when all of it is.
Opens are approximate. They are counted by a 1x1 image at the end of the signature. Apple Mail and Gmail fetch every image themselves, so an open through them is counted but its place and device are shown as hidden by the mail provider, and a reader who has images switched off is not counted at all. The image is on for every signature and can be switched off for any one of them under Analytics, Signatures.
Replies and forwards are counted with the email that started the conversation, so a conversation is one line. An email sent to several people is opened by one of them: the page says so rather than naming one.
Where your company has its own domain connected for codes and links, the tracked links in a signature use it, so a reader who hovers over one sees your address. Without one they use lynkarr.com.
When somebody replies to you, their email quotes yours, and opening their reply would count as your own email being read again. Those are left out: an open of a conversation shortly before you reply in it is taken to be yours, and the network it came from is recognised from then on.
An administrator sees the whole company's email. Anybody else sees only what they sent. Each email, open and tap is kept for a year; the totals are kept for as long as the account is.
Making one
Publish your card, then use Email signature on it. Choose a layout, press Copy, and paste it into your mail client's signature setting.
It is built from the card, so the name, role, contact details and the link to your card are whatever the card says at the moment you copy it.
Pasting makes a copy
This is the part worth being clear about, because most tools in this area are not. A pasted signature does not update when your card changes. What your mail client sends is what you pasted.
Your photograph and your company logo are the exception: those are linked rather than copied, so replacing them updates every signature already sent. Everything made of words does not.
So when you change your job title, paste it again. That is one action, and it is a smaller cost than believing something updated when it did not. If your company is on Microsoft 365, the next section removes the pasting altogether.
Or on Microsoft 365, written into the message itself
On Business and above: rather than writing a signature into a mailbox setting, a small mail relay inserts it directly into each message as it's sent — above the reply, not appended to the bottom of a whole thread the way a transport rule would, and with a genuinely different signature possible for a new message, a reply, and a forward.
A meeting invitation gets your signature like any other email you write. A meeting cancellation, and your answer to somebody else's invitation (accepted, declined, tentative or a new time proposed), is sent as it is, with no signature: those carry no message of their own.
This is a separate feature from the card-based signature this article otherwise describes, built for the Signatures screen rather than a personal card, and it needs a short one-time setup in your own Microsoft 365 — two mail connectors, a mail flow rule, and two DNS records. Open Signatures and press Automated setup: you sign in as a Microsoft 365 administrator and Lynkarr makes the Exchange settings for you and checks them, and adds the DNS records on your provider's own approval screen where the provider supports it (Cloudflare does). To make the same changes by hand instead, press Setup guide.
Available on Business and above, as the Signatures add-on: $1 a month for each covered mailbox, counted daily, with the first 14 days free. A covered mailbox is one a signature group would sign; anything on the Never-sign list is never signed and never billed.
Signature groups: which signature an email gets
On the Signatures screen a company keeps a list of signature groups. Each group owns up to three signatures of its own (First email, Replies, Forwards) and the rules that say when it applies. For each recipient of an email the groups are tried from the top of the list: the first one that fits is used. Drag a group, or use its arrows, to change the order. A new group starts switched off, so nothing changes for anybody until you turn it on.
Overview shows the three signatures. An empty Replies or Forwards slot offers a choice in its place: Same as First email, or No signature. Senders is who the group is for: everyone in the company, everyone at one of your domains, or the users, Microsoft 365 groups and shared mailboxes you add. Exceptions is who it is never for; their email goes on to the next group down.
Recipients is decided for each recipient separately: All, Internal (an address at one of your own domains) or External, with an Always include and a Never include list of addresses and domains. When one email goes to people who should get different signatures, each receives their own copy; the To and Cc lists are unchanged for everybody.
Date/Time is Always, or a schedule of one or more times: a date range picked from a calendar (with Repeat every year), days of the week, and hours. A time ticked Do not apply this group during this time always wins. Times are read in your company's time zone.
Advanced rules has two parts. Only when the email contains: the group applies only when the subject or the body contains some text, such as [Acme] or #acme, which is how one person with two job functions picks a signature as they write; the text is taken out before the email is delivered unless you untick it, and replies in the same conversation keep the same group. Stack signatures: whether the group adds its signature under one the sender already put in themselves in Outlook, and, once it is applied, whether to stop or to continue to the groups below so that each one that fits adds its signature underneath.
Test an email, on the list of groups, answers "what would this email get?" without sending anything: describe who it is from, who it is to, the subject and when, and it shows the groups used for each recipient, the signature on their copy, and why each group above was passed over.
Business includes five signature groups; Enterprise has no limit.
Why some Microsoft 365 groups say "Fixed at last sync"
On the Groups table under Signature templates, every group carries one of two badges. Updates itself means the group has an email address, so Microsoft can name it directly in a mail flow rule and Exchange works out who is currently a member every time a message is sent — add or remove someone in Microsoft and the signature rule picks it up automatically. Fixed at last sync means the group has no email address, so the rule instead lists the members read at the last directory sync; it still works today, but will not notice someone added afterward until the next sync.
The whole distinction is that Microsoft cannot name a group without an email address in a mail flow rule. A plain security group — the default kind in Microsoft 365 — has no address by design; a mail-enabled security group or a Microsoft 365 group does.
- In the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Teams & groups → Active teams & groups.
- Open the group and turn on "Let people outside the organization email the group" — or, for a plain security group, convert it to a mail-enabled security group.
- Once it has an address, the group shows Updates itself the next time your directory is read.
The Gmail limit
Gmail keeps only the first 10,000 characters of a signature, counted as HTML rather than as visible text. The screen shows how many you are using before you copy, which is not something you will find elsewhere — the usual experience is a signature that arrives cut in half.
The reason pictures are linked rather than embedded is the same limit: a single embedded logo can be more characters than the whole allowance.
What a company can add
Under Team, an owner or admin can set a legal footer that appears on everybody's, and add banners — a picture and a link under the signature.
A banner can be aimed at one team, and given a start and an end date. A banner aimed at a team beats one aimed at everybody. Where several still apply, one is chosen per person and stays chosen.
That last part is a real limit rather than a design choice: a pasted signature does not change between emails, so a rotation spreads banners across people rather than across messages. Tools that rotate per email do it by rewriting mail as it is sent, which is a different thing from what this is.
Why it looks plain
Because desktop Outlook draws email with Word rather than with a browser. Rounded corners, background images, modern layout and web fonts all silently do nothing there, so a signature that relies on them is broken for a large share of the people receiving it and looks fine to whoever made it.
There are also no background colours anywhere, deliberately. Several mail clients invert colours in dark mode and nothing can stop them; text on no background is the only thing that survives both.