Using Outlook and Outlook Express

Assorted hints and tips to avoid annoying your readers

1. Turn off sending HTML

Microsoft Outlook defaults to putting parallel duplicate HTML and text attachments in each mail it sends out. So, everything you type and quote gets sent in text and also repeated in HTML with lots of tags -- the HTML is often quite hard to read by other HTML-aware mail agents, thanks to use of fixed font sizes and other Microsoft HTMLisms.

That HTML attachment also comes first in the email, which is annoying if you're using a text-only MIME-unaware mail agent, and have to page through the HTML to get to the raw text.

It's rare that the HTML attachment is useful; best to turn off HTML to decrease capacity used and Look Smarter. To turn off HTML, select Options from the Tools menu. Make sure that 'plain text' is selected under the 'message format' and 'Internet...' or 'Settings' options.

Below are some illustrative screenshots.

Unfortunately, Outlook will still default to replying in HTML to any HTML mail received, overriding your preferences, so a single person sending HTML can lead to a cascade of HTML replies in the thread... you get the picture. You may be able to reformat HTML mail received using Format- Plain text, but messed-up indentation can be a problem... Outlook's handling of wrapping and indentation is very weak, and is discussed further below.

2. Send attachments using MIME

If you send your emails as Rich Text rather than as Plain Text, your attachments will be sent as Microsoft-Outlook-only winmail.dat files containing the attachments. People using other mail packages will not be able to read the files you send. Selecting Plain Text makes Outlook use the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) standard that all mail agents support. Further information on winmail.dat is available.

3. Improve quoting and reflowing abilities

You will want to tell your Outlook to quote text in the conventional manner like:


> this. Where each line of text is preceded by the usual
> chevron.

If you go to the Tools->options->Preferences tab->E-mail Options button, you can check the "Read all standard mail in plain text" box, and then HTML will be converted to plain text and properly quoted.

The Outlook Quotefix and Outlook Express Quotefix utilities allow you to customize or remove the 'Original Message' header that Outlook adds, and improve quoting and reflowing paragraphs of text to make it even easier for readers to follow discussions and figure out who said what. (However, these utilities won't help you with the broken wrap-at-n-characters setting in Outlook 2002.)

Oh, another hint:

0. Use something better?

And here's how to read email as text in Outlook 2002.

Lloyd Wood (L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk)
May 2006