How to Exclude Employees from Email Signature Management

Not every employee needs an automatically managed email signature. Executives with custom designs, service accounts, and shared mailboxes are common exceptions. Lastline makes it easy to exclude specific employees while keeping everyone else in sync.

When to Exclude Employees

The exclusion feature is designed for employees who should not receive automatic signature updates. Common use cases include:

• C-level executives — Often have custom, hand-crafted signatures with unique layouts.
• Service accounts — Shared mailboxes like support@, info@, or billing@ don't need personal signatures.
• Contractors and freelancers — External team members who shouldn't use your company signature.
• Test and demo accounts — Internal accounts used for QA or demos.

How Exclusion Works

When you set an employee's status to "excluded" in Lastline, several things happen:

• They are skipped during automatic signature deployments.
• They are excluded from Google Workspace sync operations — their data won't be overwritten.
• They are excluded from assignment rule evaluations — no rules will target them.
• They do not count toward your plan's seat limit — you only pay for active users.

Excluded employees remain visible in your employee list. You can filter by status to quickly see who's excluded and why.

How to Exclude Employees

The easiest way to exclude employees is with the bulk action feature:

1. Go to the Employees page in your Lastline dashboard.
2. Select the employees you want to exclude using the checkboxes.
3. Click the Bulk Actions button in the toolbar.
4. Select Set Status → Excluded.
5. Confirm the action.

The change takes effect immediately. The employee's existing Gmail signature remains untouched — it simply won't be updated by Lastline going forward.

You can also add a note to any employee explaining why they were excluded (e.g., "CEO — custom signature") by opening their detail panel.

This is especially useful during initial setup when you've synced your full directory from Google Workspace and need to carve out exceptions.

What Happens to Their Signature

When an employee is excluded:

• Their current Gmail signature remains as-is. Lastline does not remove or modify it.
• If they had a Lastline-assigned signature, it stays active in their Gmail but won't receive updates.
• They can still manually copy a signature from Lastline if needed — the signature link remains active.
• Reincluding an employee is as simple as changing their status back to "active".

Best Practices

• Always add a note — Future admins will appreciate knowing why someone was excluded. "CEO — uses custom signature" is more helpful than no explanation.
• Review exclusions quarterly — People change roles. A contractor who became full-time should probably be reincluded.
• Use assignment rules first — Before excluding, check if an assignment rule can give them a different template instead.
• Don't exclude to avoid billing — Excluded employees genuinely don't count toward your seat limit. But if someone is active and sending emails, they should have a managed signature.