Get started with Ascripto on Google Workspace

Last reviewed 19 October 2026

Ascripto reads the email signatures your people are actually sending, shows you who is off-brand and why, and, on a paid plan, writes the right signature into everyone’s Gmail. Nothing is installed, nothing changes in how your mail is delivered, and the audit is free at any size.

Time: about ten minutes of your own, plus one setting that a Google Workspace super admin makes once.

You need:

• A work Google account at your company’s domain (a personal @gmail.com account will not do).
• A Google Workspace administrator to connect the directory. That may be you.
• A Google Workspace super admin to allow signature access. That may also be you. If not, you will be able to send them the exact steps; they do not need an Ascripto account.

The whole journey

1. Sign in and create your workspace.
2. Connect your directory, so Ascripto knows who works at your company.
3. Allow signature access, so Ascripto can read each person’s Gmail signature.
4. Read your audit. This is free, and nothing is changed.
5. Decide what everyone’s signature should be.
6. Start a 14-day trial or choose a plan.
7. Deploy.

Steps 1 to 4 take minutes. Step 5 takes as long as you want to spend on the design.

Step 1 — Sign in and create your workspace

1. Go to app.ascripto.com and click Continue with Google.
2. Choose your work account.
3. You will see Set up Ascripto for yourcompany.com. A workspace is where your company’s email signatures are checked and managed. Read the three steps it lists, tick the box accepting the Terms of Service and Data Processing Agreement on behalf of your company, and click Create workspace.

You are now the workspace’s owner. You can invite other administrators later, in Settings → Team.

If you see something else:

• Ascripto needs a work account — you signed in with a personal account. Click Sign in with a work account and choose the one at your company’s domain.
• yourcompany.com is already on Ascripto — a colleague has already connected your directory to a workspace. Ask them to invite you (Settings → Team → Invite an administrator) rather than start a second one.

Step 2 — Connect your directory

On the Welcome to Ascripto page, step 2 is Connect Google Workspace.

1. Click Connect Google Workspace. A page on auth.ascripto.com says exactly what will be read: your people, their job titles and phone numbers, and your company’s verified domains. Read-only: nothing is written to Google.
2. Click through to Google and click Allow.
3. Back in Ascripto, the step says Connected, then Reading your directory… 20 people so far with names appearing as they are found, then ticks itself with the count.

From now on Google tells Ascripto about each change to the directory as it happens, and the whole directory is read every hour as well. You can also read it at any moment in Settings → Connections → Read it now.

If Google refuses: That Google account can’t read your directory means your account is not a Google Workspace administrator. Either sign in to Google as one, or click Not a Google Workspace administrator? Invite one, enter their work email, and they get a link (valid seven days) that joins them to your workspace as an administrator so they can connect it. You can also copy the link and send it yourself.

Step 3 — Allow signature access

Ascripto reads each person’s Gmail signature through a Google service account that a super admin allows once, for your whole domain. Google has no read-only version of this permission, so it also allows updating signatures. The audit only reads; nothing is changed until you deploy.

Step 3 on the Welcome page shows four numbered steps with the two values you need beside a Copy button. A super admin does this:

1. Open the Google Admin console at Security → Access and data control → API controls → Manage Domain Wide Delegation (the page links straight there).
2. Click Add new and paste the client ID shown in Ascripto.
3. Paste the OAuth scope shown in Ascripto, exactly as shown.
4. Click Authorize.

Ascripto checks every 20 seconds while the page is open, and again when you come back to the tab. There is also a Check now button. Google can take a few minutes to apply the setting; the page says Not allowed yet until it does. The moment access is seen, the page goes to Home and your first audit is already reading.

Not a super admin? Click Copy these steps and send them to one. They do not need an Ascripto account, and the client ID and scope are in the text.

Step 4 — Read your audit

Home is the audit. The first run shows Reading signatures… 12 of 47 with a progress bar; after that, the bar shows off-brand against on-brand, and under it one row per cause:

• have no signature at all
• don’t have their name in their signature
• don’t show the job title your directory has
• don’t show the work phone your directory has
• have no logo
• mailboxes couldn’t be read, so they aren’t counted (shown apart; a mailbox Ascripto could not open is not evidence about anybody’s signature)

Each row is a link to exactly those people, on People, with what the directory says should have been there. The audit runs by itself once a day; Check again runs it now. Last checked always says how old the numbers are.

Read “Here’s exactly what we watch, and what we can’t.” It opens a panel beside the numbers. In short: Ascripto watches the signature Gmail uses for new messages, for the words, images and links. It does not see the separate signature a person may have chosen for replies and forwards, nor a “Mobile signature” set inside the Gmail app on a phone, and it does not judge fonts, sizes or colours. Somebody who keeps your signature and adds their own mobile number is not off-brand.

Nothing has been asked of you so far except two permissions, and nothing has been changed in anybody’s mailbox. This is where the free plan ends and you decide.

Step 5 — Decide what everyone’s signature should be

Three places matter, and you can do all of this on the free plan.

Assets → Brand kit. Upload your logo (an SVG or EPS gives the sharpest result; PNG is fine), pick a font and four colours, and enter your company’s profile links (LinkedIn and the others). Every signature follows the kit unless you give it its own look, so changing the logo here changes it everywhere.

Signatures. The first visit asks for your company name, because the directory does not hold it and it goes after each person’s job title. A Default signature already covers everyone, so the coverage bar reads Everyone is covered from the start. To make a different signature for a group of people, click New signature, give it a name, and choose how to start:

• From the gallery — five designs of ours, drawn in your Brand kit for one of your real people.
• Import from Gmail — read a colleague’s existing signature and turn it into a managed one, with each value that matched the directory made into a field.
• Start from HTML — paste or upload markup you already have (Business plan).
• A copy — of a signature you have.
• Blank.

Then Who gets it: rules such as Department is Sales or Group is sales@yourcompany.com, checked top to bottom, first match wins, the Default last. The screen says how many people each signature reaches and warns about a rule nobody matches.

The editor. What you see is the real signature for a real person; Preview as switches to anyone, to the person with the fullest record, or to someone with missing fields. Type @ in any text to insert a field (name, job title, phone and so on). A field that is empty for someone can leave its line out or show something else instead. The meter at the bottom shows the signature’s size against the limit every mail client is comfortable with. Changes save by themselves; Publish makes a version.

Nothing reaches a mailbox until step 7. On the free plan you can build and preview everything and deploy nothing.

Step 6 — Start a trial or choose a plan

The workspace’s owner does this in Settings → Billing.

• Start a 14-day trial of Business. No card. One trial per workspace. Nothing is charged for the trial. Add a payment method in Manage billing before it ends to keep a plan; otherwise the workspace goes back to the free audit and Ascripto stops writing signatures.
• Choose Team or Business. You pick a billing country (which fixes euros or dollars), then pay by card or SEPA Direct Debit on Stripe’s page. You are billed at the end of each month for that month’s seats; the smallest bill is €9 or $9.

A seat is a person whose Gmail carried your current signature at some point in the month. Leavers, people you never deployed to, and shared mailboxes nobody sends from cost nothing. The month’s count so far is shown on the same page all month. Prices and the plan table are at ascripto.com/pricing/.

Step 7 — Deploy

Two ways in, one review page:

• On Home, each cause row a deploy fixes carries Fix these.
• On Signatures, Deploy….

The review says, before anything happens, who gets a new signature: the people from that cause row, the people one signature reaches, or everyone the signatures cover. Each mailbox is read first and left alone if it already carries its signature; tick Rewrite even where current for signatures somebody edited by hand. The page states the count and the timing (signatures go live as each is written, roughly twenty a second). Click Deploy to N people and watch it finish.

After this first reviewed deploy, people who join and people whose directory entry changes get their signature by themselves. A change to a rule or a design still waits for a review like this one; Signatures says N people’s signature changes at the next deploy until you run it.

What your people will notice. Their signature is a normal Gmail signature: they see it while composing, it is in their Sent Items, and it appears in the Gmail app on their phone unless they have set a “Mobile signature” inside the app on that device. Gmail lets a person choose a different signature for replies and forwards; that choice stays theirs. They can also edit the signature back, which is why the audit keeps running: Home will show you when someone does, and Fix these puts it right.

Afterwards

• Daily: the audit runs; Home shows the result and when it last ran.
• Within a couple of minutes of a change in Google Workspace: new people get a signature, changed titles are updated.
• Hourly: the whole directory is read, in case a change was missed.
• Settings → Connections shows both permissions and lets you re-check or reconnect.
• Settings → Team is where you invite another administrator or see who did what.

To leave: Settings → Billing → Manage billing → cancel (the plan runs to the end of the month). Then remove the two permissions in Google: the directory consent (the administrator’s Google account → Linked apps, myaccount.google.com/linkedapps) and the domain-wide delegation entry (Admin console → API controls → Manage Domain Wide Delegation → delete the client). Signatures already in people’s Gmail stay as they are. Your data is exportable for 30 days and then deleted, as the DPA sets out.

Questions: hello@ascripto.com. Plans and quotes: sales@ascripto.com.