Relevant Products: Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for Office 365 | Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for G Suite
Scenario
When viewing, replying/forwarding an email that has been sent using plain text format, the signature displays misaligned and without formatting.
Example:
Reason
Exclaimer Cloud is based on HTML in the source code. When an email is converted to plain text the HTML formatting is removed, along with images and horizontally aligned elements appearing underneath each other.
Outlook displays a warning message prompting what will be lost when using plain text mode, as they are unsupported:
Due to security reasons, Outlook also displays the full hyperlink when plain text is used - this is so you know where the URL is pointing to.
In the above example screenshot, we know that commas, separators and the address fields would display underneath each other when compared to how they were configured to be side-by-side in the signature template.
Resolution
To resolve this issue, you can either follow method 1 or method 2:
Method 1
To minimise the issue, we recommend combining the fields into one text box where applicable.
If a field is not required for everyone, we recommend to re-position the field or create two versions of the field by using conditional visibility as shown in Method 2.
When combining fields, we also recommend including the separators whether they are a pipe, comma, forward slash and so on - this helps to minimise the issue and allow the fields to align correctly.
The plain text will now align the text correctly as per the HTML template.
Example:
Method 2
Follow the same steps as before, however, to ensure that the Company Name and Mobile will hide if they are not available - we will use conditional visibility, to control the fields further.
To achieve this:
- Add the Job Title and Telephone number fields into the template while ensuring the rest of the template stays in place.
- Apply the formatting required, to match the signature theme.
- Set Visibility on the text boxes to the field you want to display - in this instance if Company Name is Visible and if Mobile is visible.
Starting with the Job Title, click on this field and navigate to the Visibility option, here we can set the visibility to check if the company name is empty, then this field will show as a single value.
- Click on the Job Title and Company Name text box and set the visibility to show if the company name is not empty (that is, populated).
This will prevent duplicate data from appearing in the signature template.
Repeat these steps, and apply them to the Telephone field, ensuring that the Company Name is replaced with Mobile for the visibility setting.
