Email signatures, measured and tested

Yes. Every template on this page is free to copy and use commercially, with no attribution required. Replace the placeholder names, titles and contact details with your own. You can modify colours, fonts and spacing freely — though if you change the layout structure, test it in Outlook before rolling it out, since that is where most signature designs break.

Outlook on Windows renders HTML using Microsoft Word’s layout engine rather than a browser engine. It ignores flexbox, CSS grid, float in many cases, and most positioning. Tables with inline styles are the only approach that renders reliably across Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and mobile clients. It looks dated, but it is what the medium requires.

Host the image on a public URL — your website or a CDN, not a local file — and add an img tag with an explicit width, height and alt text inside a table cell. Keep it under about 200px wide and 50KB. Bear in mind that many recipients have images blocked by default, so never let the logo carry information that isn’t also in text. That is why every template here works without one.

Most often it is one of three things: the signature was pasted through Word or Google Docs, which injects conflicting markup; a font was used that Outlook cannot render, so it fell back to Times New Roman; or Outlook’s automatic link styling overrode your colours. Paste directly into the signature editor rather than through another program, stick to web-safe font stacks, and set link colours inline on every anchor.

Keep the width at or below 600px — the templates here mostly sit between 250px and 420px, and each card shows its measured width. For height, four to seven lines is the sweet spot. Total file size should stay under about 50KB including any images; Gmail clips messages that grow too large, which can hide your signature behind a “show trimmed content” link.

Only if your industry or legal team requires it. Disclaimers have limited legal weight in most jurisdictions and add visual clutter to every message you send. They are standard in healthcare, legal, and financial services, where regulators or professional bodies may expect them. If you do need one, keep it small and grey so it reads as a footnote rather than competing with your contact details — the Confidentiality Notice template above shows that treatment.

Manually, you would send each person the template and instructions, which drifts out of sync almost immediately. The alternative is a server-side signature manager that applies signatures at the mail server as messages are sent. That guarantees consistency across desktop, web and mobile, applies to replies and forwards, and lets you update everyone’s signature or swap a campaign banner from one console.

Yes. All sixteen are narrow enough to fit a phone screen without horizontal scrolling, which is the main mobile failure mode. Note that signatures set in desktop Outlook do not sync to the Outlook mobile app — each device keeps its own, so you would need to set it up separately on every device. Server-side signature tools avoid this entirely, since the signature is applied after the message leaves the device.