Microsoft Outlook 2007 Plain Text/HTML message behaviour?

Question

I use MS Outlook as email client. When I receive email from certain email addresses(sender within my company/domain itself), and I use the reply button option to reply it, all the menus like - Font type, Font size, Text color, Bold, Italics, Text indentation, Bullets, numbering, are disabled. It doesn't allow me to use any of the above features. This happens only for some email id's where I receive mail from. Not all. Then when I checked in the message properties, it was Plain Text , rather than HTML.

But shouldn't outlook allow me the formatting of the messages I reply/compose based on My settings which are HTML?

How can I enable to have Rich text formatting enabled while I reply to a text mail?

Answer 1

There is a VBA solution to change the setting for all contacts here http://www.vboffice.net/sample.html?mnu=2&pub=6&smp=32&cmd=showitem&lang=en

More here http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/contacts/let-outlook-decide-the-best-message-format-to-use/

You can manually change the format of the reply as described here. http://www.msoutlook.info/question/628

Answer 2

Individual contacts in Outlook can have overrides set for the format mail is sent in (regardless of other settings in Outlook). To check/set the format for an Outlook contact:

• Open one of the troublesome contacts.
• Click underlined email address.
• Select “Let Outlook decide format”.

Hope that helps...

(PS: there's no way to mass-change all contacts, not that I've found anyway)

Answer 3

Outlook by default replies using the same format as the sender, if you want to change this, hit reply on an email, then double click on the name of the sender in the "To" field. You will not see an option at the bottom labled "Internet format" and you can change it from "Let Outlook decide the best sending format" to the one you want.