Disable Roaming Signatures in Outlook Classic

Picture a customer support team using a shared Microsoft 365 email account to streamline customer inquiry management. Each team member requires a unique email signature for their responses. However, with Outlook’s roaming signatures feature enabled, signatures sync across all devices, blending them together. This creates confusion and inconsistency, forcing users to repeatedly adjust their signatures.

This article provides a solution for disabling the roaming signatures feature in Outlook Classic. This is particularly useful when multiple users share a Microsoft 365 email account and need to maintain unique email signatures.

Note: This solution applies only to Outlook Classic. For newer versions such as Outlook for Windows (aka. Outlook New) or Outlook Web, there is currently no known method to disable roaming signatures.

Problem

In Outlook Classic, when multiple users share a Microsoft 365 email account, the automatic syncing of email signatures can lead to signatures being mixed up across different computers. This occurs because Outlook syncs signatures by default.

Solution

To resolve this issue, you can disable the signature sync feature in Outlook Classic. This will allow each user to maintain their own unique signature when using the shared email account.

There are two methods to disable the roaming signatures feature:

Method 1: Using PowerShell (Recommended)

Follow these steps to disable signature sync using PowerShell:

1. Open PowerShell:
   • Press the Start button
   • Type "PowerShell" and click to open it
2. Run the following commands:

   New-Item -Path "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Setup" -Force
   Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Setup" -Name "DisableRoamingSignaturesTemporaryToggle" -Type DWORD -Value 1

3. Restart Outlook for the changes to take effect.

Method 2: Using Registry Editor

Alternatively, you can disable signature sync by modifying the registry directly:

1. Open Registry Editor:
   • Press the Start button
   • Type "regedit" and open Registry Editor
2. Navigate to the following path:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Setup

3. Right-click in the right pane and select "New" "DWORD (32-bit) Value"
4. Name the new value:

   DisableRoamingSignaturesTemporaryToggle

5. Double-click the new value and set its value data to 1
6. Close Registry Editor and restart Outlook

Note: These changes only affect the current Windows user account.