Email disclaimer (often abbreviated as signature) is a block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an e-mail message. Information it usually contained includes the sender's name, address, phone number, legal liabilities and so forth.
Protect your company against the legal implications of e-mail
In recent years, many regulations about email for commercial communication have come into force in varies countries. For example, Germany has laws requiring companies to disclose their company name, registration number, place of registration etc. in e-mail signatures. Ireland's Director of Corporate Enforcement requires all limited companies operating websites to disclose such information in their emails. The UK's ECommerce Regulations require this information in all emails from limited companies as well. While criticized by some as overly bureaucratic, these regulations only extend existing laws for (paper) business correspondence to email. Any infringement to these regulations will result in lawsuits.
Most email clients, including Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, can be configured to automatically append an email signature to each new message. However, this method is lack of flexibility and there is no way for a company to verify if a disclaimer was added and its content is correct. With EA Disclaimer, the Exchange Server administrator can setup the disclaimer for each user on server side, and it doesn't require end users to setup the signature, disclaimer in their email client any more.
Setup Disclaimer
EA Disclaimer appends a disclaimer to outgoing email automatically based on sender email address or sender domain. First of all, click "EA Disclaimer & SMIME Manager" from "Start menu -> All Programs -> EA Disclaimer & SMIME->Disclaimer & SMIME Manager" to begin the setup. Secondly, click "Disclaimer" -> New, the following diaglog box will popup.
Sender Email Address or Domain
Input an email address or domain name here, if an email address is specified, a disclaimer will be appended to every email from this email address; similarly if a domain name is specified, a disclaimer will be appended to every email from this domain. If you have "This is a global disclaimer" checked, the disclaimer will be appended to all emails from this server no matter the sender address is. Global disclaimer, domain disclaimer and email address disclaimer can be added at the same time. Email address disclaimer will be appended first, and domain disclaimer will come next following the email address disclaimer and global disclaimer will be the last one.
Disclaimer Rules
After sender email address or domain is input, you can create a disclaimer for it. Global, domain or email address disclaimer can have multiple disclaimers. Click "New Disclaimer Rule", the following diaglog box will popup.
Plain Text and Html Disclaimer
Email message can have plain text body or html body, so both plain text disclaimer and html disclaimer should be set. When user send a plain/text email, the plain text disclaimer will be appended to the email body. Likewise when user send a text/html email, the html disclaimer will be appended to the email body. You can also insert an image in Html Editor, the image will be added to the email as embedded picture automatically.
Default Encoding
To support multiple languages, disclaimer is saved as UNICODE characters. However, the email message is encoded as Multi-byte. Therefore, before the disclaimer is inserted into the body text, the body text will be converted to UNICODE characters too. After the disclaimer is inserted into the body text, the body text will be converted back to Multi-byte based on the charset specified in the email. In most case, you don't need to specify the Default Encoding. But some emails from very old mail system doesn't have charset information, in this case, you should to specify a default encoding to convert the UNICODE and Multi-byte.
Options
After editing both text and html disclaimer, click "Options" to specify which email the disclaimer should be appended.
For example: if your internal domain is: mydomain.com and you only want your internal user to see this disclaimer, you should select add disclaimer to the email with all recipients specified in the list below and input *@mydomain to the list. Note: with this option active, if an email contains two recipients, xxx@mydomain and xxx@otherdomain, disclaimer will not be appended. If you want such email has disclaimer appended too, you should select the email with at least one recipient specified in the list below
If you only want disclaimer to be appended to the email to outside domain, you should choose add the disclaimer to the email with no recipient specified in the list below and input *@mydomain to the list.
When finished, click "OK" and go back to the previous dialog, you will see a rule is listed. Click "OK" or "Apply" to save the setting.
Then you can create multiple disclaimers for the same user/domain based on recipient's address.
Using Active Directory fields(ADSI variables)
EA Disclaimer has the ability to personalize disclaimer by utilizing user’s Active Directory objects attribute. To add an attribute, use this syntax: {$adsi:AttributeName}, where "AttributeName" is the attribute you want to show up in the disclaimer.
Important Notice
Disclaimer will not be appended to email body under the following situations:
The email is not MIME compatible in Exchange 2000/2003.
For example, if the email is sent from outlook to internal user and it is in RTF format,
disclaimer will not be appended to the RTF email.
So with Exchange 2000/2003, you should send the email to outside domain to test the disclaimer.
See Also
ADSI Variables in Disclaimer
Digital Signature
Email Encryption
Appendix - Set up DomainKeys/DKIM
Appendix - Set up SPF record in DNS server