Getting email to look the way you want is, in general, is one of the most
frustrating things about Outlook. Something as simple as setting a default
background color, font and font color seems impossible. The limited set of
themes & stationary are not customizable. Creating and using your own seems
to have been intentionally discouraged by design. Finally, if you give up and
settle for included themes or stationary the fancy bullets and horizontal
lines don't work (appear the same as they do when no theme or stationary is
applied).

I've Googled sites that tell you how to work around some of these
shortcomings (use FrontPage, etc), but why does it have to be this difficult?

[XP SP3, Outlook 2007 SP2, email format: HTML]

BTW, these annoyances are referring to Outlook 2007 in case anyone didn't
notice the version info at the bottom of my original post. Some of these
things were actually a little easier in previous versions of Outlook.