In the business world, e-mail communication not only enables information sharing, but also enables legal and organizational requirements to be met. Organizations may choose to add legal notices, special notification texts, footers and/or headers to e-mail messages in line with various legal regulations, departmental needs and company policies.
Microsoft Exchange Onlinee, to meet such requirements”disclaimer” (legal notice) functionality via transport rule. In this article, Exchange Online We will explain the steps of configuring a transport rule to create legal notices, signatures or notification templates that will apply to all users or specific user groups.
Table of Contents
What is Email Disclaimer?
A "disclaimer" is a text that is usually added to the bottom of an e-mail message and limits legal responsibilities regarding the content of the message or explains certain conditions. These texts are used to prevent legal disputes between the sender and the recipient, to protect the confidentiality of information and to emphasize corporate policies.
Disclaimers are added via rules called "transport rules" in email systems like Exchange Online, Exchange Server. These rules examine incoming and outgoing emails based on certain criteria and apply defined actions
Disclaimer vs Email Signature
Due to its structure, Disclaimer can be designed as an e-mail signature with some predefined variables, so it can be designed as a signature by pulling data from Attributes in Entra ID or On-Premises Active Directory. However, due to its structure, Disclaimer should not be used as a signature.
An email signature is a text that usually contains personal or corporate information about the sender and ensures that the communication is completed in a professional manner. However, a disclaimer is different from a signature and the two concepts should not be confused. A signature provides the sender's contact information and identity details, while a disclaimer indicates legal responsibilities and warnings. This distinction allows legal texts to be presented more clearly while preserving the structure of the message.
Because disclaimers are added to the bottom of emails, the original email becomes a separate, new email when it is replied to or forwarded. Therefore, a disclaimer needs to be re-added to each email. The “Apply disclaimers” template in Exchange Online is designed to serve this purpose. However, using this method to add signatures can cause some problems because re-adding user signatures to the bottom of each email is incompatible with the purpose and usage of the signature. For example, you don’t want to see the same signature listed five times down the line when an email is replied to five times.
“If you want to provide centralized signature management, you need to provide it through 3rd party applications (Code Two, Exclaimers, etc.)”
How to Create a Disclaimer on Exchange Online
There are two different methods to create a Disclaimer on Exchange Online;
- Exchange Admin Center
- Exchange Remote PowerShell
We will do this in this article via the Admin Center;
First, we need to log in with our admin account at https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/.
We follow the Mail Flow – Rules steps.
We need to access Apply Disclaimers via the Add a rule button.
In the Name section, we need to enter a distinctive name for the Transport Rule we will create.
In the Apply this rule if section, we need to enter the condition for which emails the rule will be applied. Here you can make a distinction as Internal/External, as well as make changes according to Subject Header, Sender or Recipient.
In this example, we will implement Disclaimer for emails coming from external senders.
In the Do the following section, the “Appley a disclaimer to the message” section is selected. Here we only need to choose between Prepend a Disclaimer and Append a Disclaimer, then we can enter the text we will use for the Disclaimer.
Append a Disclaimer: Without preventing the legal notices from being read (in the lower section), It is used when it is necessary to provide additional information. It is especially suitable for messages aimed at sharing information.
Prepend a Disclaimer: Immediate visibility of legal notices (in the upper section) and is used in situations where it must be taken into consideration. It is especially preferred in situations where legal or security-critical information must be transmitted.
We can enter the text we want to be valid for Disclaimer from the Enter text section, as we mentioned above, you can define variables within Disclaimer. Examples of variables you can use;
%%City%%%%Company%%%%CountryOrRegion%%%%Department%%%%DisplayName%%%%Fax%%%%FirstName%%%%HomePhone%%%%Initials%%%%LastName%%%%Manager%%%%MobilePhone%%%%Notes%%%%Office%%%%Pager%%%%Phone%%%%PostalCode%%%%PostOfficeBox%%%%StateOrProvince%%%%StreetAddress%%%%Title%%%%UserPrincipalName%%%%WindowsEmailAddress%%
I write the text I want to be active in the “specify disclaimer text” section with the Enter text section.
fall back to action Select one if the disclaimer can't be inserted section to specify the action that the transport rule should take if it cannot change the message.
If a mail rule cannot modify the message to include a disclaimer (for example, if the message is encrypted), you must specify what to do. This is known as the fallback option for the rule. The available fallback options for disclaimer rules are:
Wrap
- Definition: A new message is created and the original message is added as an attachment to the new message. The disclaimer text is added to the new message and forwarded to the recipients. This is the default value.
- Use: The content of the newly created message is what other mail flow rules (for example, the message subject or the text in the message body) will examine, not the original message. If you want the original message to be examined and processed by other rules, set the disclaimer rule to a lower priority and the other rules to a higher priority so that they are applied before the disclaimer rule.
- Failure Condition: If the process of adding the original message as an attachment to the new message fails, the original message is not delivered. The original message is returned to the sender with a non-delivery report (also known as an NDR or bounce message).
- Important Note: Do not use the Wrap value for rules that affect messages from external senders. Use the Reject value instead. The effects of the Wrap value prevent Safe Attachments scanning of messages from external senders. To find the affected rules, run the following command in Exchange Online PowerShell:
Get-TransportRule | where {$_.ApplyHTMLDisclaimerFallbackAction -eq 'Wrap' -and $_.FromScope -eq 'NotInOrganization'}ignore
Definition: The rule is ignored and the original message is delivered without legal notice.
Reject
- Definition: The original message is sent back to the sender with a non-delivery report (NDR).
The preview of the Disclaimer rule we finally created is as shown in the image below;
With Next we can proceed to the page where we can enter the start time and end date/time of the rule or write a Comment.
In the Review section, you can see the preview of the rule configurations we created. You can save it by clicking Finish.
Since we selected Prepend when creating the rule, the Disclaimer we created appears at the top of the incoming e-mail;
In this article, we talked about defining Transport Rules for Disclaimer on Exchange Online, I hope it was useful.
Do you need to convert your User Mailbox account to Shared Mailbox in Exchange Online? You can get detailed information from the article below.
How to Convert User Mailbox to Shared Mailbox – Cengiz YILMAZ
