InfiniTec - Henning Krauses Blog

Don't adjust your mind - it's reality that is malfunctioning

Render HTML emails as plain text in Outlook

Affected products

Summary

This article describes the products listed in the beginning of this article can be configured so that they render HTML emails as plain text.

Description

HTML email are simply complete web pages that are sent by mail. These mails can contain images (so called web bugs) that can be used to track who reads the sent mail. This way, spammer can verify if your email account is an active one, so they can send you more unsolicited mails. On the other hand, HTML emails can contain embedded script code that may be harmful to your computer.
The affected programmed can now be configured so that they render HTML emails as plain text.

Solution

  1. To change the behavior of Outlook, the following steps are necessary:
  2. Open the registry editor.
  3. If you are using Outlook XP, navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Options\Mail.
  4. Create a new value of type DWord called ReadAsPlain.
  5. Set the value to 1.
  6. After Outlook has been restarted, all HTML emails are now rendered as plain text.

Status

This behavior is by design.

Posted by Henning Krause on Friday, December 31, 2004 2:03 PM, last modified on Monday, November 29, 2010 9:31 PM
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