External logo for Outlook Signature blocks

This is real geeky stuff but it's what I do all day. We have had an ongoing problem with logos in Outlook Signatures being broken or missing. This is especially a problem for the executive staff who do lots of email from home. We'll set up their signature block to point to a local copy or a server copy of our logo.

Then somehow that logo will get deleted or moved or a mapped drive will fail to map on logon or something else will cause it to not work. There's nothing more unattractive and unprofessional than receiving an email from the CEO with a big red X where the company logo should be. In fact it can be downright embarrassing when trying to impress a new client.

So we decided to point the signature block address to a copy of our logo stored on our external web server. Then we just make sure that we have set up the signature properly on whatever machine the employee uses to access Outlook email - at work or at home or both. It even works great for our road warriors who live out of their laptops.

It really is quite simple. The signature block is simple HTML code. We don't like to create the signature directly in Outlook because it bloats the file and creates subfolders for the logo - or rather for a copy of the logo. So we create a lean and mean piece of code with an embedded link to the logo on the web server and put it in the right folder on the workstations.

By the way, that folder location is Docs & Settings \ Username \ Application Data \ Microsoft \ Signatures. Once you place the HTML file in the folder and turn on the signature block from within Outlook it automatically creates the .txt and .rtf versions of the file that it requires. Of course Outlook must be set to use HTML format when creating or responding to emails in order for the logo to show up.

Here is picture of the sample code that worked for us.