What should you ask when choosing email signature software? Most demos show the editor, which is the least risky part of the product. The questions that matter are about your mail: where it goes, what happens when the vendor has a bad day, and how you leave. Here are ten to put to every supplier, with Footer365's own answers so you can hold us to the same standard.
A server-side signature product has to see each outbound message to add the signature. Ask which country its servers are in and whether you can choose. Footer365 routes mail from Exchange Online to its relay for your data region and straight back to your tenant, over TLS in both directions. Our article on how mail flows through Footer365 shows every step.
The answer you want is no. Footer365's relay keeps no copy of any message, only a processing record of the sending address, the rule and template used and the number of recipients.
This is the most important question on the list. If Exchange Online cannot reach the Footer365 relay, it keeps the message in its queue and retries, as it would for any unreachable server, and the message is delivered with its signature once the relay answers. People will notice delayed mail, not lost mail.
Ask what happens if a payment fails or the account is switched off. Footer365 never permanently rejects mail your organisation genuinely sent because of the state of your account: with signatures paused for billing, mail is delivered without one.
Ask specifically about the iPhone's own Mail app, which sends plain text. Footer365 converts plain-text email to HTML on the way out so it carries the full signature, and removes "Sent from my iPhone" lines.
Nobody can add a signature to a message that is encrypted before it reaches them without breaking the encryption. Footer365 passes S/MIME and rights-protected messages through unchanged. Ask a vendor who claims otherwise how they do it.
Ask whose signature a shared mailbox gets, whether replies can have a shorter signature, and where the signature goes on a reply. Footer365 puts it above the quoted earlier message, and a rule can give replies a short template.
A vendor should be able to explain each permission in plain English. Footer365 publishes the list and the reason for each in Permissions Footer365 asks for, and why.
Per-user prices hide a lot in the definition of a user. Footer365 counts mailboxes with an Exchange licence and does not charge for shared mailboxes. Our post on email signature software pricing compares published prices at three sizes.
Ask what the vendor removes from your tenant and what you have to remove yourself. When a Footer365 subscription ends, it removes both of its transport rules, disables both connectors and turns people's own Outlook signatures back on if you had turned them off, and records each step in your audit log. Removing its access to your tenant is then yours to do, from your enterprise applications. You can also download every template and rule as a backup file before you go.
Write the ten questions into your evaluation, ask every vendor for written answers, and weight question 3 above all the others. Our comparison page covers the feature differences, and the security page has the rest of our answers in full.
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