Email Signature Generator

An email signature generator builds the block of contact details at the bottom of your emails so it looks right in every inbox. Our free tool gives you four templates, a live preview and a signature built with tables and inline styles, the old-fashioned HTML that Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail all display reliably. Add your name, role, phone, website, logo, social links and brand colour, plus the company details UK limited companies are required to show. Copy the finished signature with one click and follow the step-by-step instructions for your email app.

How to use the Email signature

1. 1 Choose a templatePick Logo left, Classic, Bold with button or Compact. You can switch at any time and your details stay in place.
2. 2 Fill in your detailsAdd your name, job title, phone numbers, email, website and address. Leave out anything you do not want to show.
3. 3 Add your logo and brand colourPaste the https address of a logo hosted on your own website, set its width and choose a colour for links and accents.
4. 4 Complete the UK company detailsLimited companies and LLPs should add the registered name, company number, place of registration and registered office.
5. 5 Copy and installClick Copy signature, then follow the instructions for Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail or iPhone and paste it into your signature settings.

Why email signatures break, and how this one avoids it

Email apps are far behind web browsers when it comes to HTML. Outlook for Windows renders email with Microsoft Word's engine, which ignores much of modern CSS. Gmail removes or rewrites some CSS, and signatures pasted into its editor lose anything not written inline. Apple Mail is generous, but phones resize and darken content in their own ways. A signature designed like a web page often arrives with broken spacing, missing colours or an enormous logo.

This generator uses the techniques email designers rely on. Layout is done with simple tables rather than flexible boxes or grids. Every style is written inline on the element it affects. Fonts are limited to ones installed on almost every device, the logo has a fixed width set in two ways, and the button is a table cell with a background colour, so it still looks like a button in Outlook.

The result is plain, sturdy HTML. It will not look identical in every app, as nothing does, but it holds together in the versions of Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail that UK businesses actually use.

What UK companies must include

If you trade as a limited company or a limited liability partnership, the law on trading disclosures requires certain details on your business letters, order forms and websites, and that includes emails sent in the course of business. The rules are set out in the Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015.

• Your registered company name, exactly as it appears at Companies House, including Ltd, Limited or LLP.
• The part of the UK where the company is registered: England and Wales, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
• Your company registration number.
• Your registered office address, which may be different from your trading address.
• If you mention share capital, it must be the paid-up share capital. If you are VAT registered, showing your VAT number is common practice and helps customers.

Getting the logo right

Email signatures cannot safely embed an image file. Instead, the signature points to a logo stored on a web server, and the email app downloads it when the message is opened. That is why the tool asks for a logo URL. Upload a PNG or JPG version of your logo to your own website, open it in a browser to check the address works, and paste that address in. It should start with https.

Avoid links to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or SharePoint. Those addresses usually point to a preview page, not the image itself, and they can stop working when sharing settings change. Social media image links also tend to expire.

Make the image file about twice the width it will display at, so it looks sharp on high-resolution screens, and keep the file small, ideally under 50 KB. A logo on a white or solid background is safer than a transparent PNG, because dark mode in Outlook and on phones can turn the background dark and make dark lettering disappear. Use the dark background preview to check. Finally, remember that some recipients block images by default, so make sure your name and contact details work as text without the logo.

Choosing a template

Logo left puts your logo beside your details, separated by a thin line in your brand colour. It is the most common professional layout and works well for most businesses. Classic stacks everything in a single column with your name in the brand colour and the logo underneath, which keeps it narrow on phones.

Bold with button adds a coloured rule above your name and an optional call-to-action button, such as Book a call or View our latest work. Use the button sparingly and point it at a page that is genuinely useful to the people you email. Compact puts everything on two or three lines with no logo. It is ideal as a reply signature, so long email threads do not repeat a large block in every message.

Many businesses use two signatures: a full one for new emails and Compact for replies and forwards. Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail all let you choose different signatures for each.

Copy signature or copy HTML?

Copy signature puts the rendered signature on your clipboard as rich text, the same as copying it from a web page. That is what you paste into the signature box in Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail. Copy HTML gives you the raw code, which you need for email platforms and signature management tools that ask for HTML, for Thunderbird's HTML signature option, or if a developer is setting up signatures for your whole team.

Copy plain text gives a simple version without formatting, which is useful for plain-text email accounts and for systems such as help desk software that do not support HTML signatures. You can also download the signature as an HTML file to keep a copy or share it with colleagues.

If you manage signatures for a team, keep the layout and colours the same for everyone and change only the personal details. A consistent signature looks more professional and makes it easier for customers to recognise genuine emails from your business.

Keep it short, accessible and safe

A signature should help people contact you, not compete with your message. Stick to the details customers actually use, avoid inspirational quotes and large banners, and keep the text at a readable size. Make links descriptive, such as LinkedIn rather than a long address, and make sure the colours have enough contrast to be read on screens in bright light.

Think about what the signature reveals. A mobile number on every email may be more than you want to share with everyone. A signature is also something criminals copy when they impersonate businesses in invoice fraud, so it is no substitute for proper email authentication. Make sure your domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up, and train staff to confirm bank detail changes by phone rather than trusting an email that simply looks right.

Long legal disclaimers are common, but they have limited legal force and make replies cluttered. If you use one, keep it short and put it at the end, in small grey text, as the generator does.

Examples you can copy

Northgate Joinery Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales,
company number 01234567.
Registered office: 14 Mill Lane, Stockport SK1 2AB.
VAT number: GB123456789.

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Sarah Thompson
Operations Director, Northgate Joinery Ltd
T 0161 496 0000
W northgatejoinery.co.uk

Common mistakes to avoid

Frequently asked questions