When pasting your email signature into Outlook Web Access (OWA), you may get an error message that says “The text you typed is too long. Please shorten it and try to save it again.”
This happens when your email signature has over 8,000 characters (or 8kb) of text, including HTML code.
Lets take a deeper look into this problem and how you can solve it.
Why does OWA have an email signature character limit?
Imagine if you could insert an email signature that is huge in size. Every time you send an email, it would take a really long time to send because each email would be really big.
This would cause mail servers to quickly fill up with useless information that just takes up disk space (which is expensive on servers) and slow everything down.
That is exactly why Microsoft and Gmail, have created rules for how big email signatures can be.
How to Check Your Email Signature Character Count
When you paste your email signature into OWA, it looks at the total number of characters that are in your email signature. This includes characters in your HTML code as well, which might not be visible to you.
If you’ve created your signature with Gimmio
Simply log in to Gimmio, and select the email signature you wish to check.
Then, on the right hand side under the signature preview, click “Check Signature Size”.
If your signature is more than 8,000 characters, it won’t work with OWA.
If you’ve created your signature manually
In order to check the number of characters in your email signature, you will need to have the HTML file of your signature.
If you open the HTML file in a text editor such as Sublime and select the whole document (Ctrl + A), you should be able to see the total character count at the bottom.
If it exceeds 8,000 characters, it will be too large to use in OWA.
How to Fix the OWA 8,000 Character Limit Problem
Use Google Chrome when Copying/Pasting
If you use another browser (especially Safari or Internet Explorer) when copying your email signature, it wont copy some HTML tables correctly. This means that you could end up with a broken looking email signature and also a higher character count as well.
So, in order to be safe, use Google Chrome when copying and pasting your email signature into OWA.
Optimize Your Email Signature
If you’re comfortable with coding, try to identify and remove unneeded code in your email signature.
Its a hard job and will likely take you a few hours, but this is a sure way to lower the number of characters in your email signature.
If you’re not confident editing HTML code, perhaps look at some of the other options on this list first. Otherwise, you can learn how to read and write HTML code from W3 Schools.
Minify the Email Signature HTML Code
Minifying your signature code will remove empty spaces and some unseen characters out of your HTML code and make it slightly smaller at the same time.
It’s always good practise to minify your email signature before using it.
HTML Minifier is a tool you can use to minify your HTML code to make it smaller in size.
Drop the Long Disclaimer
Disclaimers just take up space and most of the time are completely unenforceable, making them pretty much useless.
Use Gimmio
Using Gimmio to create your email signatures will mean that you’re in control of the size of your email signature at all times.
With an in-built character counter, you’ll be able to adjust the size of your signature to ensure it works with all email clients.
Wrap Up
When you follow our list of tips above, you should be able to lower your email signature size to be below OWA’s 8,000 character limit.
If you havent already, try our FREE email signature tool which has over 40 templates to choose from and allows you to change the size of your signature without any coding experience.
