Set Up an Automatic Signature for Your Email Account

The inspiration for this tutorial came from my sister. Although she has had a website for some time, she has just recently found time to add some enhancements. The one at the top of her list was to set up some text to be automatically added to the end of her email messages. However, she didn’t know what it was called or how to create one. This automatic text is called a signature. Your signature can be anything you want but usually it includes your professional title and other information. My sister has two email accounts. She uses her AOL^R account for personal messages and Outlook ^R Express on her computer at work. She wanted the instructions for how to create her own signature. Because many of you may want to do the same for your own website, I decided to write this tutorial. Let’s first create the AOL email signature and then one for Outlook Express. The instructions for Outlook^R are very similar to those for Outlook Express.

How to Create an AOL Signature

Open your web browser to aol.com and log in to the email account.
From the Menubar at the right of the screen, click the Settings button which will open the Authoring Settings screen.
Go to the Signature section at the bottom of the screen.
Place a checkmark in the box next to Add this signature to messages sent using AOL Mail on the Web.
Type the text for your signature into the text input box. If you wish to add a hyperlink, copy and paste the link into the box. If you decide to use hyperlinks, you will also need to send your email messages in HTML format. To do this, place a checkmark in the box next to Use Rich Text/HTML Editing. You will find this box at the top.
Click the Save button at the bottom of the screen.

How to Create an Signature in Outlook Express

Open Outlook Express.
From the Menubar, click Tools and then Options to open the Options dialog box. Click on the Signatures tab.
If you are creating your first signature, the controls will be grayed out. Click on the New button and a new signature will be added to the Signatures box. This will be the default signature which will be automatically added to all email messages.
Above this box, verify that a checkmark is in the box next to Add signature to all outgoing messages. If you do not want the signature added when you are sending a reply or forwarding an email, uncheck that box below.
Move down to the Edit Signature section at the bottom of the dialog box. You have the option to type the text directly into the box or designate the contents of an external file to be used as your signature. The second option is beyond the scope of this short tutorial so lets choose the other. Type the text for your signature into the box. If you wish to add a hyperlink, copy and paste it into the box. To use hyperlinks, you also need to set the Mail Sending Format to HTML on the Send tab.
Click Apply and then OK.

Start a new email message and verify that your new signature appears in the message section. Just place your cursor above the signature to write your message and then send your email as usual.

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