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”.
btm.geek
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.
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?
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.
That seems to do the trick for me as well. I always hated the ‘blue line of evil’!
Thanks a lot!
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
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.
I’ve googled around for this at least 4 times since outlook 2007 came out, and each time I almost end up throwing my monitor out the window before figuring it out. There’s a post on expertsexchange (ho ho ho) that covers it. After the guy posing the quetsion has exchanged 10 posts with what must be a brick.
Where “paragraph unindent” used to break the blue line in quoted html, you now need to do whatever hitting control+q does. Something about paragraph formatting.
It still doesn’t use the character you’ve chosen to quote with, but at least it lets you reply in-line without ambiguity.
So, again, hit control+q to break the blue line.
ctrl+q doesn’t work. It looks like it works but after you send it, the line comes back.
Amazing that Microsoft can’t even do basic email stuff correctly.
Is there any hope for the opposite problem: getting Outlook to render correctly inline quoted messages as per RFC3676 in a non-awful fashion? As far as I can see, it basically doesn’t do anything with the quote character at all, in a howling RFC violation, and just dumps it as unformatted 7-bit text.