Microsoft Outlook Signature Problems

This week I wanted to create a neater and more professional signature for my emails, and in particular, I wanted to add the social networking Icons and links you see above.

I had many problems along the way trying to add the Icons and rather than elaborate on these issues, I would prefer to cut a long story short and explain how I managed to get to the final result above.

The first thing I did was use google images to find the Icons for Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, LinkedIn, Blipfoto, Skype and Twitter. I saved these all in one folder together. I also made a list of the URL to my home pages on each of these web sites.

For some reason when you use outlooks own signature editor due to ActiveX and other reasons, the images don't appear and it doesn't seem to work properly. My version of outlook is ancient (2002) and I am sure there must be better systems on the more modern versions.

I worked out in the end that the only way to do it was to create a html page and add the images to this from the same folder as the index file. I downloaded Kompozer, a free html editor. It's very simple to use, as long as you have a basic knowledge of html.

I typed in all the contact information and then added the icons one by one, adding their link at the same time when inserting the logo. I also re-sized them all so they looked the same size, and Kompozer has a neat way of doing this, giving you the size as you re-scale.

Once I was happy with the layout I the html file in the same folder as the Icons. I then went into Outlook and went to Tools/Options/Mail Format/Signatures. I then chose New signature and gave the signature a name and making sure the 'Use this file as a template' was ticked I browsed for the file I just saved. And that is it - all done!

I hope this helps. I just hope now my emails don't start getting sent to my clients Spam bins, I will have to wait and see.

Cheers Keith