Scott Hanselman

A while back we had a nice discussion about Email Signature Netiquette. How much flair was too much?

I talked about creating more dynamic and customized signatures in Outlook 2007...

Getting HTML (or FeedBurner) Dynamic Email Signatures in Outlook 2007

My signature is generated by FeedBurner, using their Headline Animator feature (that I love).

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman">
  <img border="0" alt="Scott Hanselman's Blog" 
   src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman.gif">
</a>

This works great, except in Outlook 2007, which no longer lets you edit your email signatures directly in HTML in their UI. Plus, because there's three kinds of email in Outlook, text, RTF, and HTML, they autogenerate all three formats for you and put the files deep in the bowels in:

C:\Documents and Settings\Scott\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures\

I don't use txt or rtf-based email if I can avoid it, so I just open the named html file in that folder and edit the part in their auto generated section '<div class="Section1">' like this:

<div class=Section1> 
<p class=MsoAutoSig>Scott Hanselman<o:p></o:p></p> 
<p class=MsoAutoSig>Chief Architect - Corillian Corporation<o:p></o:p></p> 
<p class=MsoAutoSig> 
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman">
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman.gif"
style="border:0" alt="Scott Hanselman's Blog"/></a> 
</p> 
</div>

I'll get a nice signature every time I start a message, and I can, of course, configure Outlook to include this signature on new emails and another, smaller one, on replies.

Making it Consistent

Barry Dorrans reminded me of the old USENET Standard for Signatures:

It's interesting to note you forget the "standard" signature prefix, two hyphens, a space and a newline which the better email clients (read "Not outlook") use to strip a signature when you hit reply. And of course there's the old usenet standard of no more than 4 lines (unless you're Biff). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block for details

And this whole thing got me thinking about which kinds of Signatures I would need. I came up with three.

First Message

This is my standard signature when it's the First Message in a thread. It includes the standard double hyphen, my Name, Title and Company, and currently an animated gif with my picture and my last few blog posts. As a public-facing person at my company with a largely work-appropriate blog, this is reasonable for me.

The picture, while it might seem self-serving, in my opinion makes work and personal email more personal. Folks like those we're currently merging with know my face before they meet me. I've started to notice others doing the same thing, especially in MSN Messenger.

--
Scott Hanselman - Chief Architect - Corillian Corporation

All Replies

For replies, the picture is removed, and the standard sig is just two lines via the USENET de-facto standard.

--
Scott Hanselman - Chief Architect - Corillian Corporation

On my Blackberry the signature looks like

--
Scott Hanselman - Chief Architect - Corillian Corporation from my BlackBerry

...so folks know I'm on a mobile device and realize that I won't be able to see some embedded rich content.

Replies including Free/Busy Information

This FreeBusy signature is one I use optionally when folks are scheduling meetings or helping schedule meetings across companies.

--
Scott Hanselman - Chief Architect - Corillian Corporation
NOTE: My Calendar is at (small private URL here)

The "small private URL" is a redirect from my site to the Microsoft Office Free/Busy Service that lets folks see my availability for meetings.

You can easily publish just your Free/Busy information to any WebDAV server or to Office Free/Busy. Consumers, either publicly or invited, can subscribe to your ICS calendar (see my recent podcast on this subject) or just view the calendar and schedule appropriately.

The signatures are easily interchangeable using the new Signature dropdown in the Outlook New Message Ribbon. Signatures are actually swapped out rather than appended; that's a very nice usability touch by the Office team.

All of these things combined means considerably fewer headaches for me in my everyday Outlook life.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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