How your signature works
Your organisation manages email signatures centrally with Sigil. Somebody in IT or marketing designs the signature; your own details are filled in from the company directory.
You do not need to install or configure anything.
What you will notice
Section titled “What you will notice”Very little, which is the intention.
When you start a new message, reply or forward, your signature appears at the bottom. It carries your name, job title, phone number and anything else your organisation has chosen to include, taken from the company directory rather than typed into each message by you.
If you send from more than one address, the signature follows the address you are sending from.
Replies and forwards may get a shorter signature than new messages, if your organisation has set one up.
Why it sometimes changes as you watch
Section titled “Why it sometimes changes as you watch”Your device keeps a copy of the last signature you were served, and Sigil puts that copy into the message as soon as it knows which address you are sending from. That is why the signature appears almost at once rather than after a pause while something loads.
Sigil then checks the copy against the current signature while you are writing. Most of the time they match and nothing happens. If somebody has published a change since your last message, the signature is replaced with the new one a second or so later, in front of you. That is the change arriving rather than a fault.
What leaves your mailbox is the current signature, whenever Sigil answers within a few seconds. The check finishes before the message can be sent, so anything you saw swap in the editor had already settled by the time you pressed Send.
If Sigil cannot be reached, or does not answer within a few seconds, the kept copy stays and your message goes out with it, so a brief network problem does not leave you signing off with nothing. If your mailbox is no longer to get a signature, because your organisation has excluded it, paused signatures or let its subscription lapse, the kept copy is taken back out of the message instead of being left standing.
The copy is your own signature on your own device, which is the same thing Outlook keeps for a signature you configured yourself. It is held for about 45 days after the last message you wrote from that address. Writing a message renews it, at most once a day.
Copies are kept per signed-in account, so colleagues who share a computer under their own accounts never see each other’s. The copy also records who it was fetched for, which matters where two people use one shared account in the same browser. There, a copy fetched for the other person can appear in your message for a moment, and is taken back out as soon as Sigil confirms who you are. It never goes out, and your own goes in once Sigil answers.
Your own Outlook signature
Section titled “Your own Outlook signature”Sigil suppresses any signature you have configured in Outlook, so you get one signature rather than two.
How it does that is Microsoft’s choice and differs by client:
| Client | What happens to your own signature |
|---|---|
| Outlook on Windows (classic) and Outlook on Mac | The signature is kept, but the default for new messages and for replies and forwards is set to (none) |
| Outlook on the web and new Outlook on Windows | The signature is kept, but the option that adds it automatically is switched off |
| Outlook for iOS and Android | The signature saved on the phone is cleared |
The setting stays changed after Sigil has done its work, so if Sigil is ever removed you would need to choose your own signature again.
If your details are wrong
Section titled “If your details are wrong”Your name, job title, phone number and address come from your organisation’s directory, not from Sigil. A wrong job title is a directory record to be corrected, and the signature follows within about an hour once it is: the first message you write after that hour may still carry the old details while Sigil fetches the new ones, and the message after it carries them.
Ask whoever maintains your organisation’s directory, usually IT or HR.
Details you fill in yourself
Section titled “Details you fill in yourself”Some organisations add a few fields the directory has no place for: pronouns, a link to your own booking page, the days you work. Where yours has, those are yours to fill in rather than IT’s to maintain.
The page is at portal.usesigil.app/me, and the “My signature” pane offers an
“Edit my details” button that opens it. What you save appears in your next
email. See filling in your own details.
Not every organisation switches this on, and there is nothing missing if yours has not. Everything in your signature then comes from the directory.
If the signature is missing
Section titled “If the signature is missing”Open the “My signature” button on the compose ribbon. It applies the signature on demand and, if it cannot, tells you why. See the My signature pane.
- Go back to the message you are writing, or start a new one.
- On the ribbon, choose My signature.
- Choose Apply my signature, or Sign in and apply if that is what the button says.
- If a sign-in prompt appears, sign in with your work account.
The pane says “Signature applied” when it has worked, and the signature is in your message. If it could not apply one, the message in the pane says why and who can fix it.
The most common cause is the first time you use it. The automatic path cannot prompt you to sign in, so if a sign-in is needed it stops quietly rather than interrupting you mid-message. Opening the pane and choosing Sign in and apply completes the sign-in, and it works automatically from then on. Opening the pane on its own is not enough, because the pane only tries a silent sign-in until you press the button.
The other cause worth knowing is a signature that was switched off and has just been switched back on. Once Sigil has told your Outlook that you are not to be given a signature, it stops asking for ten minutes rather than asking again on every message, so a change your IT team made a moment ago can take that long to reach you. Opening the pane and pressing Apply asks straight away. The ten minutes are counted separately for new messages and for replies and forwards, so pressing Apply in a new message puts new messages right, and replies catch up when their own ten minutes run out, or at once if you press Apply in a reply.
On your phone
Section titled “On your phone”The signature is applied automatically on Outlook for iOS and Android, but there is no “My signature” button, because Outlook mobile does not support one.
If your signature is not working on your phone, open the pane once on a computer and choose Sign in and apply. That fixes the phone too, because the sign-in is tied to you rather than to a device.
Two things on mobile are normal rather than faults: on a reply, the signature is not visible until you expand the compose window to full screen, and a message started from the iOS Share sheet does not get a signature.
Sending from a shared mailbox
Section titled “Sending from a shared mailbox”Switch the From field to a shared mailbox and you get that mailbox’s signature
rather than your own, which is the point of having one. Your organisation can
also have it name you, so a message from sales@ signs off “Jane Doe on behalf
of Sales” rather than just “Sales”.
Whether it does is up to whoever writes the templates. If yours does not name you and you think it should, that is a request for the person who looks after signatures rather than something you can change from Outlook. See sending on behalf of a mailbox for what they would have to set up.
If the shared mailbox is open as a separate account rather than as a folder in your own, and you get no signature there at all while your own messages are fine, that is not something you can fix from Outlook either. Outlook only runs add-ins in that kind of window when the add-in has been set up to allow it, and your administrator is the one who can update it. Tell them, and point them at where the add-in runs in a shared mailbox.
Things that look wrong but are not
Section titled “Things that look wrong but are not”A new message you have not typed anything into will not be saved as a draft, even though the signature was applied. Outlook does not save an otherwise untouched message.
Getting a copy of your signature
Section titled “Getting a copy of your signature”The “My signature” pane offers a download. It saves your signature as a self-contained HTML file, which is useful if you want to paste it into another system or keep a copy. See download my signature for the steps.
Who to ask
Section titled “Who to ask”Your own IT team administers Sigil. They can see whether your mailbox is receiving signatures and why an attempt failed, which is more than you can see from Outlook.