How to set an email signature in Salesforce
A signature banner has to live somewhere every recipient can reach it. The route is to upload the image to Files, turn it into a public link, and point an image tag in your signature at that link. Five steps, with a screenshot of each one.
What you are about to do
Your signature field is a small text box, so a designed banner cannot be pasted into it directly — the image has to be hosted somewhere first, and reachable without logging in. Salesforce Files does both jobs: it stores the image, and its Public Link gives you an address anyone can open. What goes into the signature field is an HTML image tag pointing at that address.
Have the banner ready as an image file — a PNG or JPG, around 600 px wide, with the text already baked in. Anything you want clickable, like your website, is better written as a separate line of text under the banner than relied on inside the image.
The five steps
Upload the banner to Files
Open the Files tab from the App Launcher and go to Owned by Me. Click Upload Files in the top right and pick your banner image. It appears in the list straight away, with your name as the owner.
Create a public link for it
Click the file to open its preview. In the black bar along the top, next to Download and Share, click Public Link. Salesforce generates an address that works without a Salesforce login — copy it and keep it on the clipboard for step 5.
Anyone holding that address can open the file, with no login and no sharing rules in between. That is exactly why it works in email — and the reason to use it only for material that is meant to be public, never for a document with customer or internal data in it.
Open your personal Settings
Click your avatar in the top-right corner, then click Settings in the panel that drops down. This is your own settings, not Setup — the gear icon beside your avatar goes somewhere else entirely.
Go to My Email Settings
Personal settings open with a search box on the left. Type email into it and the tree filters down. Click My Email Settings.
email in personal settings. My Email Settings is the first result under the Email group.Put the image tag into Email Signature, then Save
The page opens on Send through Salesforce — your display name, your return address, and the automatic BCC setting. Below that is Signature. Do not paste the bare link here: wrap it in an image tag, so the banner renders inside the email instead of arriving as a line of text the recipient has to click.
The width keeps the banner from overflowing a narrow mail client, and the alt text is what shows when images are blocked. Click Save when it is in.
src, plus width and alt. The line above states the ceiling: 1,333 characters max.Add your contact lines as text
A banner is one image, and plenty of mail clients block images by default — which leaves your signature as an empty box and nothing else. The fix is to repeat the essentials as real text under the tag, so the details survive either way:
That whole block is well under the character limit, and it is the version worth keeping. Text also makes your address and website selectable and searchable, which an image never is.
Open any record, send one email to your own address, and look at it in the client your recipients actually use. That is the only reliable check — the preview inside Salesforce is not the same rendering engine as Outlook or Gmail.
Four things worth knowing
- 1,333 characters, markup included. The limit is printed above the field. A single image tag is comfortably inside it; a hand-built HTML block with inline styles is not.
- Links need https. A link renders only when the address starts with
https://. Salesforce public links already do, so paste the address exactly as it was given to you, without trimming it. - Images need HTML-format email. If the message goes out as plain text, the recipient sees the image tag as raw code instead of the banner. The text lines underneath are what rescue that case.
- Templates replace the signature. Choose an email template and Salesforce stops appending your signature — put the banner into the template body, or insert the Sender signature merge field, which carries plain-text signatures only.
A note under the signature box says every outgoing email carries a "Powered by Salesforce" tagline. That is a Developer Edition behaviour and it disappears in the paid editions — it is nothing to do with your signature.
If something does not look right
| What you see | Why | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| A URL instead of the banner | The bare link was pasted, with no image tag around it. | Replace it with <img src="…" width="600" alt="…"/>. |
| A broken image box | The public link was never generated, or it was revoked. | Reopen the file preview and create the Public Link again. |
| Raw tag text in the email | The email went out in plain-text format. | Send as HTML, and keep the contact lines as text as a fallback. |
| No signature at all | An email template is selected. | Build the sign-off into the template body instead. |
| The signature is cut off | Past 1,333 characters. | Shorten the markup — one image tag plus two text lines is plenty. |
Salesforce Help references
- Add email signature in Salesforce — the navigation path in Lightning and in both Classic Setup interfaces.
- Add an image to an email signature — why images need HTML-format email, and the template exception.
- Add a signature to email templates — the Sender signature merge field and its plain-text limitation.
Salesforce renames menu items between releases. If a label here does not match your org, search for the page name — My Email Settings — rather than following the menu position.
