Your e-mail signature does not appear in e-mail messages that you reply to in Outlook 2003

When you reply to an e-mail message in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, your e-mail signature does not appear in the e-mail message. You experience this symptom even if you configured Outlook 2003 to include an e-mail signature every time that you reply to or forward an e-mail message.

This problem occurs if you configured Outlook 2003 to use the Attach original message option when you reply to an e-mail message. If the original text of the e-mail message is not included in the reply, the reply header data is not created. In this situation, Outlook 2003 cannot determine when to add an e-mail signature to the e-mail message.

This problem was first fixed in a hotfix that is now contained in a service pack. If you installed the latest Office 2003 service pack, you do not have to install the hotfix.

Service pack information

This problem is corrected in Office 2003 Service Pack 3. To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Office 2003. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Hotfix information

How to obtain the hotfix

This issue is fixed in the Outlook 2003 post-Service Pack 2 Hotfix Package that is dated November 7, 2005. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Note This hotfix fixes this issue only if you performed the following steps. This hotfix does not fix other scenarios for e-mail signature issues.

1. You create an e-mail signature to use when you reply to or forward e-mail messages.
2. You turn off Microsoft Office Word 2003 as your e-mail editor.
3. You configure Outlook 2003 to use the Attach original message option when you reply to or forward e-mail messages.
4. You reply to an e-mail message that uses one of the following font formats:
   • Rich Text Format
   • HTML
   • plain text

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

This problem was first corrected in Office 2003 Service Pack 3.