Think about all the people your constantly emailing… customers… potential customers… industry influentials… friends… etc… how many of these people are visiting and reading your blog posts? Now imagine having your blog posts being visible on the bottom of everyone of your emails along with your normal signature ( name, position, phone, website, etc ) … that is what I’ve often thought would be neat to have. So I did some searches to see if there were any Outlook apps/plugins that could take care of it. Here is my quest:

Searching for: Dynamic outlook signatures rss feed

http://www.exclaimer.com/..  Expensive corporate solution. Looks like it would work; but only available for 10 or more users… no individual license available.

http://redwax.wordpress.com/2007/04/12/dynamically-changing-the-contents-of-e-mail-signature-using-rss-feeds-in-c/ – If your good with C# this might be an option. From 2007.

After finding no solutions and just a bunch of spammy sites I had an idea…. I remembered that the signature data is actually held in txt, rtf, and html documents …. so I thought if I could have an external bit of software to process the rss feeds and spit them into my signature template then I would be in business!

So I searched for: outlook email signature html file location and found where my signatures were stored… : C:\Users\Wes\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures . So I’m on to something here… now I just need that external bit of software to do the auto updating and feed option configuring. I’ll keep you posted!

Update: I think I am finally dumping Outlook and switching to Gmail… There were a few reasons why I was holding out… One of them was the ability to paste screenshots directly from you my clipboard into an email message which is something that Gmail just recently supported (  as long as you’re using the Google browser  ). So I started looking for ways to get RSS feed headlines into my Gmail email signature… Turns out there is a company called WiseStamp that almost does what I want… It falls short in that it only will include the latest blog post link and does not support adding more than that. So I am continuing my search.

April 22nd Update: I found a solution to get my multiple blog headlines into my Gmail signature ( also works with other mail clients ) … it’s called http://www.brandmymail.com/. 100 emails a month is free… $30 a year for unlimited… watch my video here:

Wes Edholm