Making Outlook 2007 quote responsibly

Somewhere along the lines of HTML emails and Outlook RTF/Rich Text trash, reasonable email quoting got lost. I’ve switched outlook to default to text emails (Tools, Options, Mail Format tab), and setup nice quoting (Tools, Options, Email Options, When replying to a message: prefix each line of the original message). But replying to an html message still defaults to HTML, giving you the “blue line of evil“. Microsoft has directions to force everything to text though, as a “security feature”.

6 Responses to “Making Outlook 2007 quote responsibly”


  1. 1 DJ

    thanks, this is brilliant and just what I was looking for.

    Outlook loses sense of where the original message and the reply end, so it spell checks the entire thing, FYI.

  2. 2 Steve Jordi

    This is totally dumb from Microsoft.
    I posted messages in forums and some people told me that not being able to break this blody blue line using the “Paragraph unindent” (as the documentation says to do) is not a bug.
    Why does it work this way in all other mail applications, including Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2003?

  3. 3 Matt

    Finally. I have been looking for a way to do this for ages.

    It’s very telling of the attitude of Microsoft that they think it’s fine to have a email client that can’t even do inline replies.

  4. 4 Johannes

    That seems to do the trick for me as well. I always hated the ‘blue line of evil’!

    Thanks a lot!

  5. 5 Peter

    I’ve been using Outlook-quotefix to get around this, and had no idea it could be configured to do it itself. That program was written for Outlook 2002, someone should change its web page to tell people it’s no longer necessary.

    I don’t want to configure Outlook to show all emails as text, because some HTML emails can’t be read properly that way. I want a way to convert just the current email to text ready for replying using this quoting method. Anyone

  6. 6 btm

    Once all emails are displayed as text by default, there an option above the message box that notifies you about the conversation which you can very easily click and choose ‘Display as HTML’ for that message.

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