I am tearing my hair out (there isn't much left)
As we all know, the Signature editor on recent versions of Outlook 2016 Mac is horrendous. I won't go into the details on that because there are tons of threads already about that (mangled formatting, no support for linked images, broken HTML parser, no Retina display support, no formatting options..... )
So, it is extremely tedious to get a signature that looks decent using Outlook 2016 Mac. Once you spend the time to do so, god forbid you have multiple Macs (home, work, laptop.... ?) you have to repeat the process all over again to get the same signature across your machines.
All I want to do is be able to export/import these signatures. It seems impossible.
My research has uncovered the following so far:
- I noticed that the Signatures seem to be stored as {GUID}.olk15Signature files in randomly-numbered folders in
~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile/Data/Signatures - If the signature contains any images, these will be stored separately as a {GUID}.olk15SigAttachment inside a "Signature Attachments" folder beneath the profile Data folder, again in a randomly numbered folder (which of course does not correspond to the random folder for the .olk15Signature)
- Both of these files are in some sort of binary format that is not easily parsed. If they are opened in a Hex Editor, some fragments are readable as HTML.
- Every time a signature containing images is edited, a NEW .olk15SigAttachment is created, yet the old one is left as a dangling orphan file.
- There is a SQLite3 database in the data folder named "Outlook.sqlite" - this database contains a table called "Signatures" which has Record_RecordID and PathToDataFile columns. The RecordID is auto incremented and the PathToDataFile contains a string e.g. "Signatures/231/4E9B12EC-497D-49CC-BCAE-8EEBCC4FB10B.olk15Signature".
- Hand editing any of these files or database entries seems to cause Outlook to barf and delete the signatures - so copying them from another Mac and then renaming them does not seem to work (why?)
- My testing was done using the latest Insider Fast build of Outlook 2016 — 15.39 (170905) under macOS 10.12.6.
How can this simple task be accomplished?
