You have that wise sentence that your grandma used to tell you when you were catching flees and that you want to share with others. You know how to do ASCII art and want to share that with others, too. You are too lazy to type your name and address at the end of every single email message you write (and, as with any routine job, you tend to make silly Ms. Takes now and then).

What you need is a signature. You have a signature? Do you have a signature automatically added to every email you write with Outlook Express for Macintosh as well? Here's how to make that little every day's magic work.

The Signature

Let's suppose you already know what your signature should look like. If you do not know the contents of your signature yet: while your extravaganza need not confirm with any taste standards, you should make sure it complies with the signature length standards.

To demonstrate the process of putting a signature in action I have already prepared a finished one:

--
This is my signature. It is mine.
It belongs to me. Me!
Eddy Ego. (I created this sig.)

The Signature in Outlook Express

Setting up and editing signatures in Outlook Express 5 for Macintosh is a straightforward process -- at least compared to its Windows counterpart and many other email programs.

Almost all signature settings are concentrated in the "Signatures" window. Selecting "Tools | Signatures" brings up this window. To set up a new signature (and discard the "Standard" signature for now), we click "New".

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The signature editing window opens. It comes pre-filled with the signature separator that was once a "standard". This separator allowed (and sometimes still allows) email clients to mark signatures in a special color, or hide them. The separator also made it possible to automatically have it removed when composing a reply to a message. So there are some reasons to keep the first line in the editing window untouched and hardly any reason to remove the separator. (Is it significant that Microsoft puts this in the Macintosh edition of Outlook Express, but is far from using it on Windows?)

Click to see full image

First, we give our signature a name. This could be "work" or "perso" or "nunstück", or anything else you like. As long as you can relate the name to the signature it's fine. (If you cannot relate it, is it still a name?)