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Sending Plain Text E-mail Messages

Outlook 2002/2003

• Select Actions | New Mail Message Using | Plain Text from the menu in Outlook.
• Create your message as usual.
• Click Send to deliver it.

OR

• With the message open, on the menu bar: select "Format"
• On the "Format" menu Select the format you want to change the message to: The menu list offers three choices: Plain Text, Microsoft Rich Text, and HTML. Select Plain Text.
• If Microsoft Word is your e-mail editor, these options may not be available.
  NOTE: Outlook Help states that you can switch message formats after starting an e-mail message, but this doesn't work if you use Word as your e-mail editor, only if you use the internal Outlook mail editor (and then only switch between plain text and HTML formats).

Outlook 2002 supports better reading and printing of plain text mail messages by allowing the user to remove extra paragraph marks. They are easily restored if you need them, for example to format tabular data. To turn this feature on or off,

• Choose "Tools"
• Select "Options"
• Select "Email Options"
• Select "Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages."

WARNING: There are known problem with this feature. See:

• OL2002 AutoClean Feature Removes Unwanted Line Breaks
• OL2002 Posts Do Not Honor Line Breaks in Plain Text Format

NOTE: If your POP/SMTP account requires you to authenticate via the POP account before sending via the SMTP address (like Yahoo mail), Outlook 2002 can handle this: OL2002: Unable to Send Mail By Using Yahoo After Upgrading to Outlook 2002 (Q289945)

WARNING: In earlier versions of Microsoft Outlook, you had the ability to break apart messages that were larger than a specified size ranging from a value between 16 KB (kilobytes) and 8000 KB. This capability has been removed from the product in Outlook 2002. See this Knowledge Base article: OL2002: The Option to Break Apart Large Messages Is Missing (Q287766)

NOTE: The setting to adjust the line length of plain text messages no longer works. Even if you change it from the default of 76 characters, Outlook 2002 appears to always use 72 characters as the line length.

WARNING: You cannot set the default format for Internet plain text messages to quoted-printable (which puts in soft returns, not hard returns at the end of each line). This makes long URLs in plain text messages unusable. A Microsoft Knowledgebase article describes how to modify the registry to set the default encoding format for plain text messages to quoted-printable. See OL2002: How Outlook Applies Encoding to Plain Text Messages (Q278134).

However, this setting may not work. As stated in the article, "Whether or not Outlook honors this registry setting depends on what software creates MIME on the user's behalf; when Outlook uses Exchange to send the message, Outlook does not honor this registry setting." While it does set the Content-Transfer-Encoding to quoted-printable, Outlook performs only partial Base64 or MIME encoding -- handling 8-bit characters, but not soft line feeds.

NEW FEATURE: Outlook 2002 SR-1 ( OL2002: Overview of the Outlook 2002 Public Update: October 4, 2001 (Q300551) (also part of MS Office XP Service Pack 1 (SP-1) OFFXP: How to Obtain the Latest Office XP Service Pack (Q307841) ) has a feature that converts all incoming HTML mail to plain text. See OL2002: Users Can Read Nonsecure E-mail As Plain Text (Q307594) for details and possible side affects.

 

Original material courtesy of Gerald E. Boyd.