Your signature appears perfectly on new emails and vanishes the moment you hit reply. Nothing is broken — every major email client treats replies as a separate setting.
Here is where that setting lives in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and on the iPhone, plus what to do when your company overrides it.
Email clients assume that on a long thread, repeating a full branded signature on every message becomes noise. So they let you configure new messages and replies independently — and the default for replies is frequently nothing at all.
You will find the same pattern everywhere: two dropdowns, one for new mail, one for replies and forwards.
There is also a checkbox controlling whether the signature is inserted before the quoted text and the dashes that precede it. Tick it if your signature appears buried below the entire thread instead of directly under your reply.
Note the account dropdown. If you have several accounts, each one carries its own pair of defaults, and setting them for one does nothing for the others.
If you have recently switched versions, note that these settings do not carry across. Our comparison of new Outlook and classic Outlook covers what else changes.
Open Mail → Settings → Signatures. Select your account in the left column, then use the Choose Signature dropdown at the bottom.
Apple Mail does not separate new messages from replies. Whatever you select is used for both, so the fix here is usually just assigning a signature to the correct account rather than to All Signatures.
Go to Settings → Apps → Mail → Signature. You can set one signature for all accounts or one per account.
The iOS signature applies to replies as well as new mail, but it is plain text only — no images, no formatting. Most people keep a short text signature on the phone and reserve the full branded version for desktop.
A few situations override anything you configure:
All three need to be resolved by whoever administers your mail system.
Once it works, decide whether you want it. A common approach is a full signature on new messages and a shorter version — name, title, phone — on replies. It keeps threads readable while still giving people your contact details.
Weight matters too: a heavy signature repeated across twenty replies is what pushes a thread past Gmail’s clipping threshold. Our size guide has the numbers.
With the Mail Ink generator you can create a full and a compact version of the same signature, keep them visually consistent, and update both at once when your details or campaigns change.