Windows mail plain text

Windows Mail does not support plain text email. Please issue a feature request through the Feedback Hub app, and use a different mail client.

In addition to training you that HTML emails are the norm, many harmful mail clients may have trained you with other bad habits. Here are some tips to unlearn them:. When you reply to an email, many email clients will include a quoted version of the message you're replying to beneath the text of your reply. This leads to long email threads containing the entire history of the discussion in an increasingly long and nested footer on every email. This is called "top posting" and is strongly discouraged.

Though some clients would have you believe otherwise, you can edit the quoted version of the message you're replying to, and you're encouraged to.

Feel free to trim it down, cutting out any extra text which isn't directly relevant to your reply - or removing it entirely. Write anything you have to say underneath the quote it pertains to. Email writers are encouraged to wrap their text at 72 columns by inserting a newline and resuming your writing on the following line. Don't worry about re-wrapping the quoted parts of message you're replying to unless you want to. If your client doesn't do this for you, it can easily be the most frustrating part of being a good email netizen, but it's very much appreciated by recipients.

HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place. The few advantages they offer for end-users, such as links, inline images, and bold or italic text, aren't worth the trade-off. However, this is an extremely common vector for phishing attacks, where a malicious sender makes a misleading link which takes you to a different website than you expect. Often these websites are modeled after the login page of a service you use, and will trick you into entering your account password.

In plaintext emails, the URL is always visible, and you can more easily make an informed choice to click it. Virtually all HTML emails sent by marketers include identifiers in links and inline images which are designed to extract information about you and send it back to the sender. Examine the URLs closely - the strange numbers and letters are unique to you and used to identify you. This information is used to hack your brain, attempting to find advertisements which are more likely to influence your buying habits.

HTML emails are good for marketers and bad for you. HTML is an extremely large and complicated set of specifications designed without emails in mind. When you reply to a message, Outlook preserves the format of the original message.

If you select the Read all standard mail in plain text option, however, Outlook formats your reply in plain text. If you change the format of the message, the reply is formatted with the new display format. On the Tools menu, click Options , and then click the Mail Format tab. In the Internet Format list, select the format that you want to use for messages to this recipient. An SMTP e-mail address contains the symbol—for example, barbara contoso. If you are using an Exchange account and sending to another person in your organization who is also using an Exchange account, this feature is not available.

Rarely, a recipient may notify you that the email message you sent appears to them as a message with an attachment called winmail. This issue is caused if you use the Rich Text message format, which the recipient's email program can't interpret correctly.

Send your message again, using either HTML or plain text format. What would you like to do? You can change a plain text message to HTML.

Create a message. Change the message format for all messages sent to a specified recipient. Open an Outlook contact. In the Email box, double-click the email address.

Click View more options for interacting with this person. Click Outlook Properties. When you want to change the message format for only one message, do the following: Create a new message. You can configure Outlook so that all new e-mail messages use the message format of your choice. In the Compose in this message format list, click the format that you want. Change the message format for all messages sent to a specified Internet recipient.

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