Sign every e-mail your organisation sends, without asking anyone to do a thing
Your colleagues forget their signature, lose it when they change phone, or keep one from three years ago. This page shows how to set it once and for all, on the server side: every message goes out signed, with your logo and a QR code, and nobody has to lift a finger.
What your colleagues will have at the bottom of their messages
One signature for the whole organisation, where only the name and the job title change from one person to the next. The QR code leads to a business card you correct online: a number changes, the card follows, and the messages already sent stay accurate.
This example is a real signature, not a picture. The QR code above works — try it.
| LT | Camille Dubois Teacher · Lime Tree School | GetQRcard |
04 222 16 20
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camille.dubois@exemple.be
·
exemple.be
|
||
What you need before you start
The account that manages your Microsoft 365 mailboxes. If you are not sure you have it, try opening admin.microsoft.com: if the page loads, you do.
An Excel, Numbers or LibreOffice sheet with everyone’s name, job title and work address. Nothing more.
Mac or PC, it makes no difference. One command has to be run on it, and it is written out word for word below.
Allow plenty of time the first time. The second organisation takes five minutes.
Prepare your staff sheet
Open your spreadsheet and make one row per person, with a header row at the very top. Column order is up to you, and so are accents and capitals: they are recognised on their own.
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
groupe |
The department or the site, if you have several. Optional. |
civilite |
Ms, Mr. Used to match the job title if you want it to. Optional. |
prenom |
The first name, exactly as it should appear. |
nom |
The family name. Required. |
fonction |
Teacher, Head, Front office, Accounts. |
email |
The work address, the one behind the Microsoft 365 mailbox. Required. |
telephone |
The switchboard number, not the person’s own. Usually the same for everyone. |
Then save the file as CSV. In Excel: File, then Save As, then “CSV UTF-8”. The separator and the encoding are detected automatically, there is nothing to configure.
Use work details only. The switchboard number, the school address, its website. No private numbers, no home addresses: that is what makes the whole thing acceptable to everyone, and spares you a negotiation row by row.
An e-mail address can appear only once. If two people share a mailbox, they share the signature too: decide who appears on it. Duplicates are refused during the review, and the original row is named.
Import the sheet into GetQRcard
Create an account, then open “Batches” and “Import an organisation”. Drop in your file and your logo.
- Nothing is created at this point: the next screen shows you what was understood, row by row, along with any rejected rows and the reason.
- Read that page. It is the only moment where a mistake costs nothing to fix.
- Then confirm: as many cards, contact pages and signatures as there are rows.
A PNG with a transparent background looks better than a JPEG on white, especially for colleagues who read their mail in dark mode.
Set the look, once for everyone
On the review screen you choose the layout, the colour, the logo size and the QR code size. The preview updates using your first row: what you see is what your correspondents will receive. This setting applies to every card in the batch — you will not be doing it forty times.
Use your logo’s colour. It is checked automatically: a QR code that is too pale stops scanning in poor light, and you will be warned before the cards are created rather than after.
Collect the three files
Once the cards exist, your organisation’s page offers an archive containing three files. Download it and keep it: you will need it again for every replacement.
The enriched sheet — your original file, plus each person’s short code and card address. This is the piece that ties GetQRcard to Microsoft 365. Keep it.
The script — a text file that writes each person’s short code into their Exchange mailbox. Open it in an editor if you want to read it: that is all it does, one line per person.
The signature block — the HTML to paste into Microsoft 365. One signature for everyone, with markers the server replaces with each person’s details as the message goes out.
None of the three works alone. The signature block looks for the short code the script wrote; without the script, everybody’s QR code would be missing.
Optional — phone number and job title in the signatures
You may skip this step. Without it, signatures already show the name, the address, the QR code and the link to the card: everything essential is there. It only adds the phone number and job title, and it is the only step of the rollout that requires a command line.
On a Mac
Open the Terminal app, paste this line and press Enter. It installs Homebrew, the macOS software manager. It will ask for your login password.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"Then this one, which installs PowerShell:
brew install powershell/tap/powershell⚠️ Then START PowerShell by typing this line. On a Mac, PowerShell is not an application you open from the Launchpad: as long as you stay in the ordinary Terminal, the next two commands will answer “command not found”. Your prompt must change and begin with “PS”.
pwshOn a PC
PowerShell is already installed. Search for “PowerShell” in the Start menu, right-click it and choose “Run as administrator”.
You are now inside PowerShell — the prompt begins with “PS”. Paste these two lines, one after the other. The first installs the Exchange module, the second connects you to your organisation: a Microsoft sign-in window opens.
Install-Module -Name ExchangeOnlineManagement -Scope CurrentUser -Force
Connect-ExchangeOnlineIf the connection only sees one mailbox when you have fifty, you have done nothing wrong: the rights you just granted the account sometimes take half an hour to reach Exchange. Close it, get a coffee, start again.
List the mailboxes that must not sign
One list to make, once: the addresses that must never carry a signature. The generic office address, the corridor scanner, shared mailboxes, technical aliases. Write them down; you will enter them in the next step.
- In the Microsoft 365 admin centre, “Active users” and “Shared mailboxes” give you the full list. Expect three to five addresses in a school.
- Everything else will sign — including the people arriving next year, without you coming back here.
When in doubt, let it sign. A technical mailbox carrying a signature is unsightly; a teacher without one is a problem someone will report to you.
The phone number and job title come from each person’s Microsoft 365 profile. They are optional: a signature without them is still complete — name, address, QR code and link to the card. See the optional step at the end of this guide.
Create the rule that signs the messages
This is the heart of the operation, and the one place where you can get it wrong without noticing. Open the Exchange admin centre, then “Mail flow”, then “Rules”, and add a blank rule.
- Give it a clear name, for example “Signature — your organisation”.
- Condition: “The sender” then “is internal/external”, and choose “Inside the organization”.
- Action: “Apply a disclaimer to the message”, then paste the signature block you downloaded in step 4.
- Exception 1: “The subject or body” then “includes any of these words”, and copy the phrase from the link in your signature. Without it, the block repeats on every reply in the thread.
- Exception 2: “The sender” then “is this person”, and enter the addresses listed in step 6.
- If insertion fails, choose “Ignore” rather than “Reject”: a message must go out even if the signature fails.
- Save, then enable the rule. It applies within a few minutes.
The drop-down trap
The second menu of the action offers two choices. Depending on the language of your console, both can read almost identically, and only one puts the signature at the bottom of the message. The other puts it right at the top, above your own text. Compare with the diagram:
Puts the signature ABOVE the message
Puts the signature AT THE BOTTOM, which is what you want
Labels differ between console languages — in French both begin with the same verb. The only check that counts is a real send: if the signature appears above your text, come back here and take the other option.
What the finished rule should look like
This is what means you never come back here. A list of inclusions would have to be extended on every arrival — and a school welcomes a stand-in every week. A list of exclusions does not move: an organisation’s technical mailboxes are the same in June as in September. A stand-in arriving in November therefore signs from their very first message, without anyone touching Microsoft 365. You only fill in their profile in GetQRcard, six fields.
It prevents duplicates. If someone has already installed the signature by hand in their mail app, the link phrase is already in the message and the server does not add a second one. It also stops the signature repeating on every reply in a thread: from the first reply onwards, the phrase is present in the quoted text.
Do not test the rule by mailing yourself: the message never leaves the organisation and the result is not representative. Send to an outside address.
Check that it works
Three checks, in this order. They take two minutes and save you from hearing about a problem from a colleague.
- From Outlook on the web, write to an outside Gmail address. Put one word in bold in the message: that forces it to be sent as formatted mail.
- Open the message you received. The signature must be at the bottom, the logo and QR code visible, the name and job title correct.
- Reply to that message. The signature must not appear a second time.
If the QR code looks broken in Mail on a Mac while it shows fine in Gmail, your setup is not at fault: that app remembers for a long time the images it failed to load on an earlier attempt. Trust Gmail.
Tell your colleagues
Send everyone a short message: the signature is added automatically, nobody has anything to install, and the old one should simply be deleted if there was one. Say what appears on the card too — name, job title, organisation details — and offer to leave out anyone who prefers not to appear. Someone given the right to refuse almost never does.
There is only one setting you may need to ask for: on a PC, in Outlook, check that messages are composed in HTML format. On phones there is nothing to do.
People who arrive mid-year
Take your enriched sheet, add the newcomer’s row, import it again. You get an updated script; run it. The rule itself does not move: the person starts signing because their field has just been filled in. Allow three minutes.
The six traps, and how to spot them
Every one of these cost us time on a real deployment. None of them appears in any official documentation. If something is wrong, start with this list.
It is the second menu of the action, whose two options read almost the same. Go back to step 7 and take the other one.
The message was sent as plain text, often from an iPhone when no word is formatted. The server then flattens the signature. Ask for one word in bold in your tests, and warn colleagues using Outlook on a PC.
This comes from images with an empty alternative text. The block supplied here does not have that flaw; if you edited the code by hand, put a space back into every alt attribute.
Exchange Online forbids writing that field and points you to another console. That is why the number goes into a free field. Do not try to force it.
Rights granted to the account sometimes take tens of minutes to reach Exchange. Nothing to fix: wait and reconnect.
The app has remembered an earlier loading failure. Check in Gmail: if the image is fine there, there is nothing to repair.
Create your organisation’s batch
The import, the cards, the contact pages and the three deployment files are all included. Belgian non-profit publisher, invoice in your name, contact details never resold.