Using the Email Signature Manager Transport Agent

The Email Signature Manager Transport Agent is used to process emails sent from your users' Android, Blackberry, iPhone, iPad and Windows Mobile devices. Unlike deployment to other platforms (such as Outlook and OWA, where the signatures are automatically included when the message is being composed by the user), pre-generated signatures for mobile devices are injected into emails by the Transport Agent during delivery through your organization's Exchange Server. This is accomplished by defining a set of rules that allow the Transport Agent to identify where in each email the signature should be injected.

Note The Email Signature Manager Transport Agent can normally only be used in conjunction with On-Premises Exchange Server, although some Hosted Exchange providers may allow the Transport Agent to be installed. The Transport Agent cannot be used with Office 365, but OWA signatures will automatically work in the OWA App for Android and iOS platforms.

Basic Architecture

The following work flow sets out the basic architecture of how signatures are injected to emails sent from mobile devices:

•The administrator authors the signatures for deployment to users in the usual manner.

•Using the Manage Deployment dialog, mobile device signatures are specified for the appropriate groups and users.
 

•Each user's signature is generated by the Email Signature Manager Service.
 

•The administrator defines the rules for identifying where signatures should be injected into emails.
 

•The Email Signature Manager Transport Agent is installed onto each Exchange Server that has the appropriate role.
 

•When an email is delivered through Exchange Server, the Transport Agent injects the appropriate signature at the location identified by the rules.

Getting Started with the Transport Agent

To get started with the Transport Agent, please follow these instructions:

1.If necessary, migrate your database to SQL Server.

2.Install the Transport Agent on to the appropriate Exchange Server(s) and complete configuration.
 

3.Configure which your users will receive mobile signatures in the Manage Deployment dialog.
 

4.Define the rules used by the Transport Agent and enable signature injection.

Injecting Signatures using the Injection Rules

When the Transport Agent processes an email, the following steps occur:

•The signature injection rules in the order in which they are defined.

•Each rule is only applied if (a) it is active, and (b) the email is in a format supported by the rule.

•If the rule is to be applied, the email is parsed for the first instance of the Text to Replace; this will take into consideration the settings for detecting new lines before and/or after the text, as well as separators between emails in reply/forward emails. When found, the generated mobile device signature is used to replace the text and hence, the signature is injected into the email.

•If a rule results in a signature being injected, then no further rules are evaluated.

Note It is not always possible to correctly identify the separator between emails. This is particularly relevant on the Apple iPhone and Apple iPad, which do not insert identifiable characters to separate emails.