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Windows Live Mail 2011, like majority of email clients, lets you add a signature at the end of your emails. Such signature contains important information about yourself and/or your activity/company and firm such as your name and surname, job title,  you phone number, fax etc. There are two signature formats: text and html file. The former, as its name suggests, lets you add plain text at the end of your emails, the latter lets you upload a html file in order to have an image, a  picture, a photo, or a badge for example, as signature. In case you have fancy and elaborated signatures in your Windows Live mail 2011, you might wish to save them all to your computer to spare yourself from the pain to create new signature from scratch. In this tutorial I will show you how to add, backup and restore your txt and html signature in a few easy steps in Windows 7.

How to create, edit and add  Signatures

1. Open Windows Live Mail 2011.
2. Click the Menu icon.
3. Click Options located at the end of the menu.
4. In the Options window, click the Signatures tab. Here you will be able to create,add and edit all your signatures.
5. The tab is divided into three sections. The first one is labeled Signature Settings and lets you tick a checkbox which will allow you to add your signature to all outgoing emails. The second one is labeled Signature and stores all your signatures. It also lets you manage them all. In fact, in this section you will be able to delete and rename them. The last section is labeled Edit Signatures and  lets you modify them. Here you will be able to find a special option that will let you upload html files to use as signatures.
6. To create a new signature, simply click the New…button and start creating your text. Windows Live Mail 2011 will automatically name your signature as Signature # 1. Of course you can change this name by clicking the rename button.

Backup Windows Live Mail 2011  Signatures

1. Click Start in your Windows 7.
2. In the Search menu, type regedit and press Enter.
3. Locate the following Windows 7 Registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\ Windows Live Mail\signatures
4. In the left pane, right-click the Signatures key and select export. The system will as you to save a .REG file. Save it to your desktop or to a folder of your choice.
5. In case you have html files used as signature, create a new folder and name it “My Signatures”.
6. Again, on the right pane of the Windows registry, right-click the signature key and click Export.
7. Save this .REG file inside this folder.
8. Again, in the left pane, under the Signatures key, you will see small folders labeled 0000001, 00000002 etc.  They are sub-keys. Click the first one.
9. On the right pane,  look at where the html file is saved on your computer. You should be able to see the full path such as C:\User\Your_Username\Desktop\Signature.hmtl.
10. Open Windows Explorer and fetch the html file for that signature you saw in the Windows registry.
11. Right-click the html file and copy it.
12. Save it inside the My Signatures folder.
13. Perform steps 8 to 12 for the other html signatures.

Restore Windows Live Mail 2011  Signatures

1. For your txt files, simply click the .REG file and choose to Merge the file with your Windows registry.
2. If you have html file signatures, open the My Signatures folder, right-cick each html file.
3. Click Properties and make sure that the html files are unblocked.
4. Copy and paste the html files back to their original locations (as seen in step 9).
5. When you are done, click the .REG files and merge their content with the Windows registry.