Email signature generator › Troubleshooting

Email signature not showing up

Almost every case is one of twelve things. They are ordered by how often they turn out to be the answer, so start at the top.

The signature is missing entirely

1. It was never saved

Gmail requires Save Changes at the very bottom of the settings page — well below the signature box, easy to miss. New Outlook has its own Save button. Reload the settings page: if the signature box is empty, this was it.

2. It is set for new messages but not replies

Every major client treats these as two separate settings. A signature that appears on new mail but not on replies is not a bug.

3. Wrong account

Signatures are per account. If you have two addresses in one mailbox, the signature is attached to one of them and mail sent from the other goes out unsigned.

4. You are sending from the mobile app

Gmail and Outlook mobile apps have their own separate, plain-text signature settings. The desktop signature does not apply to mail sent from the phone.

5. Plain text mode

If the message itself is plain text, the HTML signature is dropped. In Outlook check Format Text → HTML.

The signature appears, but wrong

6. It shows as plain text

In Apple Mail, this is Always match my default message font being ticked. In other clients it usually means the paste stripped the styles: paste into a message body first, then copy from there into the signature box.

7. The layout collapsed in Outlook

The signature is using CSS that the Word engine ignores — flexbox, grid, float, margin on divs. It needs to be table-based with inline styles. See the HTML explained.

8. The HTML shows as visible code

Raw HTML was pasted into a visual editor. Paste the rendered signature instead.

9. Fonts changed in transit

font-family is not set on every text element, so the client applied its own. Inheritance is unreliable in email; repeat the declaration.

The logo is missing

10. The image URL is not public

Google Drive and Dropbox share links return a viewer page, not an image file. Test the URL in a private browsing window.

11. The recipient blocks images

Common in corporate mail and default in several clients. Nothing to fix — but it is why alt text matters and why a signature should never be one image.

12. Mixed content

An http:// image referenced from an https:// context is often blocked silently. Serve the logo over https.

When the cause is not on your machine

Four causes that no amount of local fiddling will fix, worth recognising before you spend an afternoon on the wrong thing:

A server-side signature is replacing yours

Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both allow an administrator to append a signature or disclaimer to outgoing mail. When one is configured, it is added after the message leaves your client — so you see your own signature in Sent Items and the recipient sees the company one, or both. If you work in an organisation and your signature is being replaced by something you did not write, ask whoever administers the mail system rather than changing settings.

A gateway is rewriting the HTML

Security gateways rewrite links for click protection, proxy remote images, and occasionally strip attributes they consider risky. Symptoms: your links point at a strange domain, or the logo loads at the wrong size. Nothing to fix at your end; worth knowing so you stop looking.

The recipient's client is the strict one

If the signature is right in Gmail and wrong for one particular client, the variable is their renderer, not your markup. Ask them which mail program they use — the answer is usually Outlook on Windows, and the fix is the table-based markup described throughout this site.

The message went out as plain text

Some clients drop to plain text automatically when replying to a plain-text message. An HTML signature cannot survive that, and it is not a bug.

Which cause is it? A short decision table

Still stuck? Isolate it in four steps

1. Send yourself a test from the client that is failing, to an address on a different provider. If it arrives correctly, the problem is at the recipient's end, not yours.
2. Check the same message in webmail. If the signature is fine in the browser and broken in the desktop app, it is a client rendering issue, not a signature issue.
3. Strip it back. Replace the signature with three lines of plain text. If that appears, the problem is in the markup; if it does not, the problem is in the settings.
4. Rebuild it. Generate a clean table-based signature and paste that. It removes every accumulated legacy style in one step, and is usually faster than diagnosing markup you inherited.

Frequently asked questions