Automatic replies, meeting invites and notifications are signed differently
How Footer365 treats out of office replies, meeting invitations, delivery reports and read receipts, Microsoft 365 notifications, and messages sent by apps and devices.
Footer365 treats most messages the same way: it looks at who sent it and which rule applies. A few kinds of message are handled differently, and it is worth knowing which, so an unsigned message is not mistaken for a fault.
Delivery reports, bounces and read receipts: never signed
Messages generated by mail servers about other messages are never signed. That covers non-delivery reports (bounce messages), delivery status notifications and read receipts. They are sent with an empty envelope sender, so the Footer365 transport rules do not pick them up. If one does reach Footer365, it is handed back to Exchange exactly as it arrived, because adding anything to it would break it, and nobody wants a signature on a bounce message.
Footer365 also never refuses one of these. If it cannot tell which organisation a report belongs to, it asks the sending server to keep it and try again later, rather than risk it being lost.
Automatic replies (out of office): not signed
Exchange Online sends an automatic reply with an empty sender address on the envelope, the same way it sends a delivery report, so that an automatic reply can never set off another one. The Footer365 transport rules only pick up mail whose envelope sender is on one of your organisation's domains, so they do not pick up automatic replies, and Exchange delivers them without a Footer365 signature. Your rules make no difference to this.
If you want your contact details on automatic replies, put them in the automatic reply text itself, which is sent as written. With mail flow, an administrator can set everyone's replies from one place, from templates that fill in each person's own details, including their manager's name and address: see Set automatic replies for your people. Replies set there are sent by Exchange in the same way, without a signature.
To check, turn on an automatic reply for your own mailbox, send yourself a message from an outside address, and look at the reply that arrives.
Meeting invitations
With the Outlook add-in, a new meeting invitation gets the signature when the organiser creates it, in Outlook on Windows, on Mac and on the web. It briefly shows Footer365 is loading your signature.... For invitations the signature is inserted once and is not swapped when attendees are added or removed: the add-in uses your external signature if there is one, then your internal one, then one for all recipients. Invitations created in Outlook on a phone or tablet do not get the signature from the add-in.
Without the add-in, with mail flow, an invitation to people outside your organisation passes through like any other message from the organiser and is signed by the matching rule if it has a text body to write into. An invitation to people inside your organisation is left to Exchange and is not signed, so that room and resource mailboxes book exactly as they would without Footer365. With the Outlook add-in only, an invitation is signed only if the add-in put the signature in as it was created.
Responses to invitations, such as acceptances, are messages from the person responding and are treated the same way.
Notifications from Microsoft 365 services
Notifications from Teams, SharePoint and other services are usually sent from Microsoft's own addresses rather than from one of your mailboxes. Footer365 only signs a message whose sender it finds in your synced directory, as a person, a shared mailbox or a mail-enabled group, so these are not signed.
A few notifications are sent from the mailbox of the person who caused them: a comment on a Planner task, emailed to the plan's members, and a voicemail or missed call notice. With mail flow, Footer365 recognises these by headers Microsoft 365 puts on them and passes them through without a signature, and the Coverage page counts them under "Microsoft 365 notification". A reply someone writes to one is signed as usual. Which messages get a signature
Mail from apps, scanners and devices
With mail flow, a printer, scanner or business application that sends through one of your Microsoft 365 mailboxes is signed like any other message from that mailbox, because to Footer365 it is mail from that address. If you do not want a signature on that mail, make sure no rule covers the mailbox it uses. A catch-all rule for All users includes it, so target your rules by group or department instead. Target by department, group or domain
If the app sends from an address that is not a mailbox in your directory, the message is passed through without a signature. An app that sends as one of your people but gives its own bounce address on another domain as the envelope sender is not picked up by the Footer365 rules at all, so its mail is sent without a signature; it is signed when the app sends from the person's mailbox, or relays the mail with the person's own address as the envelope sender. Which messages get a signature
With the Outlook add-in only, mail from apps and devices is never signed, because it is not written in Outlook. Using the Outlook add-in only
Related
Still stuck?
Tell us what you were trying to do and what you saw. Include the sender, a recipient and roughly when a message was sent, and we can trace it.