Outlook Express Signature




E-mail is possibly one of the most used methods on contact in the modern world,  and as the most used computer operating system is windows,  then most people are using the e-mail program that is built in ... Outlook Express.

Outlook Express has one bad habit that I detest ... When you click on "Reply" it puts your signature at the TOP of the message.  WHY? we all know that your signature goes at the end of a letter .. so why put it at the beginning.

Well ..Before the Internet became "the big thing",  most e-mail was found only inside corporate networks,  almost all of which used proprietary mail protocols rather than standard Internet protocols.  Microsoft Mail and Exchange Server were and are such proprietary systems.  Many of these systems, including MS Mail, adopted the convention of placing quoted material at the bottom of a reply, below the signature.

This makes sense in a corporate environment where e-mail is used not so much to conduct a conversation but rather as a replacement for hand-written notes left on other employees' desks or messages left on an answering machine.  Internet news on the other hand developed as a conversational tool,  with lots of back-and-forth commenting,  point by point arguments and such.  In such a conversational environment, it makes much more sense to place quoted material at the top of a reply and the signature at the bottom.

With OE, and its predecessor Internet Mail and News, Microsoft decided to be consistent with its other mail clients rather than Internet clients,  and so quoted material is placed below the signature.  However  MS finally added a hidden option to insert the signature at the end of a message after quoted text.  This requires that you edit the registry,  so PLEASE read the instruction fully,  and if at all unsure of what you are doing,  STOP.  We cannot be held responsible for you mucking up the registry!


Close Outlook Express and all message windows.
Click Start,  click Run  and type without quotes "regedit".
Navigate to this key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0


where GUID is the long number used for your Identity.
On the Edit menu,  point to New,  and then click DWORD Value.
Type without quotes but with blank spaces  "Reply At End",  and then press Enter.
Double-click the new Reply At End value and enter 1,  and then click OK.

Now when you click on reply in Outlook Express,  you signature will be at the bottom of the Quoted text.









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