Comments on: Microsoft uses Word to render Outlook emails

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:52:44 +0000

Not sure how this is related but I have a customer who finds Outlook 2003 to hang when she clicks the MAIL FORMAT tab under Tools->Options. Just HANGS, and you have to shut down the Outlook processs to get free… I think this may be related to the use of Word or other “reader”… Any help gents??

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 15:19:52 +0000

Open RegEdit and go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

Set DWORD “ReadAsPlain” to “1″.

Plain text. Just as email should be.

By: chad

chad — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 16:56:32 +0000

@Derek

I can tell you who uses Comic Sans… the people in marketing, or maybe the middle age product research mom of 4 with a love of the color pink of a baby blue pen stripped background with a size 18 font in a hand written classic script face.

I’m not making this stuff up… when you work at a corporation interacting with all types of people you get some that are smart enough to figure out what all those check boxes and drop down menus do…. and they intend to use every single one of them.

…. I have gotten emails I had to copy and paste into notepad just to read them :(

@Thomas
Amen brother

By: Derek

Derek — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 05:27:34 +0000

I don’t know what emails you’re getting, but who uses comic sans & papyrus? SPAM? I think I speak for everyone else saying that sometimes corporate emails come through with more important information than levitra or viagra.

By: Thomas J. Brown

Thomas J. Brown — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 04:13:48 +0000

What’s wrong with using something like, oh, I don’t know, NOTEPAD? Why the hell do you even need backgrounds, floated images, and entire messages written in Comic Sans (or worse, Papyrus)? Give me plain text any day.

By: Derek

Derek — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 02:18:34 +0000

That’s so sad that if Outlook locked up you could kill Word and be back to normal… Sad, sad, sad. I couldn’t get this latest news to move towards Word rendering for HTML emails out of my head as I drove by the Microsoft Campus.

By: PVL

PVL — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 01:56:09 +0000

Chad – True, but you could opt not to use Word for composing e-mails. You’d lose some options, but at the same time you’d reclaim 40MB of RAM. Not a bad idea if you always have Outlook open.

By: chad

chad — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 01:00:55 +0000

I thought they had used word all along… not from poking or proding, but I always noticed if Outlook locked up you could kill “winword.exe” and sometimes that would save it from a complete crash…

regardless… I hate it