You've noticed that e-mails from certain friends always arrive with a witty quote at the bottom, or a blurb advertising their company. You can customize your own Hotmail messages to add a quote at the bottom of each message as well.

Tip: When you add an automatically inserted quote, you'll also get the opportunity to edit it with each message that you send -- so you won't have to include the quote with every outgoing message. This might enable you to use some off-color quotes in your signature, and still take them out if you're sending an e-mail to your boss or grandmother -- if you remember!

To set up your signature, first sign in to Hotmail, and then click "Options" in the upper-right corner, and beneath that click "More Options":

On the page that comes up, under "Customize your mail", click the "Personal e-mail signature" link:

On the next page, you can enter your desired e-mail signature into the large text box:

Above the box, you can see a row of buttons that allow you to customize things like the text color, the font, or the font size of the words in your signature, as well as inserting "emoticons" (the little yellow smiley and frowny faces). If you're familiar with using buttons like these in Microsoft Word or other word processing programs, then you already know which buttons can be used to set font, color, etc., but here's a brief tutorial. First, select the text whose properties you want to change:

Then click the button whose effect you want to apply, like the "Bold" button:

To change the color of the selected text, click the font color button (the capital "A" with the red underline) and then click on the color you want:

When you're happy with your signature, click the "Save" button at the bottom-right of the page.

Now, when you compose a new outgoing message, the signature text will appear inserted into your mail:

where you can of course edit it or take it out, before you send the message.

Finally, note that whenever you send any messages from Hotmail, a small blurb for one of Microsoft's services is appended to the bottom of the message, below any signature that you may have inserted:

These messages are inserted by Microsoft and cannot be disabled, as an advertisement for their services in exchange for their users getting to use Hotmail for free.

Bennett Haselton is a technology and political blogger who graces this blog with his presence when he's not writing pages about how to bypass SmartFilter and related subjects.