We are very happy to announce the immediate availability of our latest major release!

Lucatec^® Mask 4.0

You can now download and purchase or upgrade it from the usual places.

As for what’s new, we have once again pushed the Signature functionality to a new level, specifically the ability to use dynamic placeholders a.k.a. Signature Macros. With this release we give you…

Active Directory Integration

Using the two new macros UserDetail and SenderDetail you can now make signatures even more versatile, essentially enabling you to use a single, centrally stored set of signature files for all employees in your organization. Instead of hardcoding things like department name, phone numbers, job title, etc. you can now simply refer to the corresponding attributes of the Active Directory user object associated with the current user or the sender used for the current message respectively.

Of course that’s not all. Besides numerous minor fixes and improvements we’ve also added a couple of subtle usability enhancements.

“Alternative Target History”

If you occasionally need to save sent messages to a different folder than the one that is defined as the default for the relevant context so far, you had to browse for that folder every time. With Lucatec^® Mask 4.0 you only have to do this once: The next time you send a message from the same context (i.e. using the same sender) you will be able to simply pick the previously used alternative folder(s) from a dropdown list.

Enterprise-oriented Enhancements

We’ve also made some improvements that should benefit users who keep their Outlook sessions open for multiple days, weeks or even months, which is quite common for example when Outlook is actually running on a server rather than a physical workstation (e.g. Citrix/Terminal Server or VMware ESX Server). To this end, we’ve implemented an internal task scheduler: Tasks which the addin so far only performed on Outlook startup, most notably Signature Synchronization, will now be run in the background periodically (daily by default).

Furthermore, customers of the special Enterprise Edition will be happy to hear that it is now possible to enforce the contents of message signatures via a new option to always overwrite the local signatures with the external ones on synchronisation. Previously, this only happened when the external signatures were newer than the local ones, thus allowing users to individually customize their signatures.