Pausing delivery
Pausing stops every mailbox in your organisation receiving a signature, and changes nothing else. The library, both editors, the preview, the test email and the per-mailbox download all keep working while it is on.
That asymmetry is the whole point. An organisation partway through a rollout has the add-in reaching mailboxes in waves and a template that is not finished. Without a pause, the only way to stop delivery is to leave the add-in undeployed, which makes the deployment itself impossible to test. Pausing separates “is it working” from “is it live”.
Where the switch is
Section titled “Where the switch is”On the Templates page, in the header of the In use card. It shows a Live or Paused badge and a Pause or Resume button next to it.
Pausing asks you to confirm. Resuming does not, because resuming restores what people already expect.
While delivery is paused the whole Templates page carries a notice saying so, above everything else on it. Everything below that notice describes a signature nobody is currently receiving, which is worth being told before you read it.
Changing it needs the assignment rules capability, which in practice means an Admin. It is the same capability as choosing the active template, because these are the same decision from two ends: one decides which signature a mailbox gets, the other decides whether it gets one at all.
What stops and what does not
Section titled “What stops and what does not”| Surface | While paused |
|---|---|
| The add-in applying a signature in Outlook | Applies nothing |
| Download from the “My signature” pane | Refused |
| The template library, both editors, drafts and publishing | Unaffected |
| Preview, including preview against a named mailbox | Unaffected |
| Test email | Unaffected |
| The admin-side per-mailbox download | Unaffected |
| Assignment rules, banners and footers | Unaffected, and still take effect when you resume |
| Seats and billing | Unaffected |
The last row is the one people expect to work differently. Pausing is a delivery control, not a commercial one. Your seat count and your subscription carry on exactly as they were, so pausing for a month does not reduce a bill. If the reason to stop is cost rather than readiness, excluding mailboxes is the tool that changes what you pay.
Resuming
Section titled “Resuming”The next message anybody composes gets a signature. There is nothing to purge and no cache to wait out, because the pause is checked before any cached signature is consulted. A paused organisation is never served a stale copy of what it had before.
What it looks like elsewhere in the portal
Section titled “What it looks like elsewhere in the portal”Pausing and resuming are recorded in the change log as “Paused or resumed signatures”, with who did it and when. Pressing the button for the state already in force records nothing, so the log holds the two events that matter rather than a run of repeats.
Requests refused because of a pause are recorded in
activity with an outcome of paused, and the event
search has a filter for them. They are recorded rather than dropped for the same
reason an excluded mailbox’s request is: a stream of them tells you the add-in is
live and working, and the only thing stopping a signature is the switch.
The health digest leads with the pause and says the coverage figures below it describe a deliberate choice. It also stops listing mailboxes that have never had a signature applied, since under a pause that is the whole organisation and none of it is a fault.
Doing it from a script
Section titled “Doing it from a script”PUT /api/admin/signature-delivery takes { "paused": true } or false, and
GET /api/admin/templates reports the current state as signaturesPaused. An
API key can reach both, given the assignment rules capability
and, for the write, not being marked read-only.
Being reachable by a key is deliberate. Cutting delivery over during a mail migration, or holding it while a rollout script runs, is the kind of step that belongs in automation rather than in somebody remembering to press a button. See the API reference.
When to use it instead of something else
Section titled “When to use it instead of something else”| Situation | Better tool |
|---|---|
| Setting up, and nobody should receive anything yet | Pause |
| Cutting over from another signature product | Pause, then resume once the old product is off |
| A specific mailbox should never get a signature | Exclude the mailbox |
| A change is risky and you want it to reach people gradually | Staged rollout |
| The current signature is wrong and an older one was right | Restore a version |
| You want to stop paying | Exclusions, or cancel in Billing |
A pause left on is silent to everyone except the administrators who can see the portal. Nobody receives a warning that their signature has stopped, because from a user’s point of view nothing has broken. If signatures are missing across the whole organisation and nobody knows why, this is the first thing to check. See troubleshooting.