The Appearance of the Email Disclaimer in Messages: Opinions

[Number51X]

We've been an Exchange 2003 shop for a while and have been forcing a disclaimer on outbound SMTP mail. We needed to do this because we couldn't get a signature forced through OWA. Prior to this users were just using a provided signature through Outlook and sigs were working with OWA on Ex5.5.

Now that we are doing sigs with both the forced outbound AND the user created sig, we are getting a lot of pissing and moaning about "redundancy" and "duplication".

My questions to the group are:

Where are you adding the default disclaimer (in the body of every passage of a thread or always at the bottom)?

Are you able to keep the default sig off of replies that already contain it?

What if anything are you doing about user signatures from Outlook?

 

[58sniper]

A disclaimer is not a signature. Two completely different things.

Disclaimers are generally appended to the bottom of messages. Depending on the solution, you can control them to make sure they are not re-added to every message in a thread it it's already there. Exchange 2007 supports this natively.

Signatures are a different story. Users create their own. Some third party solutions like Exclaimer allow you to do both in the same app, and can pull AD parameters to make a consistent signature for all users.

However, if you've got users who are digitally signing messages, appending a disclaimer after the user hits SEND will break the digital signing.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Zelandakh]

There are seldom technical solutions for sociological problems...

Educate the users to remove the duplication and use disclaimers to disclaim and signatures to sign off.

 

[wahnula]

I am using eXclaimer, in my case it WAS a technical solution to a sociological problem, a user that was WAY too personal in his Outlook signature. We modified a template with a company logo and that was that. The app also has an option for disclaimers along with signatures and rules regarding duplication.

For example, my signatures (we do not use disclaimers) do not appear at all on in-office email, and only appear once in repeat correspondence. It was a lifesaver to me.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[Zelandakh]

good to hear.

 

[Number51X]

Thanks for the input. It looks like Exclaimer may be just the thing to stop all the whining.