Email to Outlook 2007 contact group is always in Rich-Text

[Scot Desort]

I have a customer who just upgraded to Outlook 2007 running under Vista. She
was previously using Outlook 2003 on XP.

Her default email composing format is set to HTML in Tools, Options, Mail
Format.

She has a contact group with 37 email addresses in the group.

When she composes a new message to the group, it is being sent in RICH TEXT
format, making attachments inoperable for recipients not using Outlook.
During message composition, the FORMAT menu shows HTML is selected. Yet the
message attachment is being sent as winmail.dat. If she manually selects
PLAIN TEXT on the composition FORMAT menu, the message goes out as Plain
text and all recipients can decode the attachment. If she composes an email
to a single recipient from the group, the message goes out properly
formatted as HTML, with the attachment in-tact (non-winmail.dat).

It appears this behavior is different than OL2003. She never had this issue
before. I have searched and can find no explanation as to why OL2007 is not
honoring the default message composition format, nor is it honoring the
message format (HTML) displayed during composition on the FORMAT menu.

I am not overly familiar with OL2007. But there does not appear to be a
"group-specific" message format setting.

Is it possible that there are 1 or more recipients in the group whose
individual address book message format settings are set to RICH TEXT? If so,
why does PLAIN TEXT override any individual setting but selecting HTML does
not override it? She must be able to send HTML emails with attachments to
the contact group.

Hopefully I have explained the situation correctly. If anyone can she any
light, it would be appreciated.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I have a customer who just upgraded to Outlook 2007 running under
Vista. She was previously using Outlook 2003 on XP.

Her default email composing format is set to HTML in Tools, Options,
Mail Format.

She has a contact group with 37 email addresses in the group.

When she composes a new message to the group, it is being sent in
RICH TEXT format, making attachments inoperable for recipients not
using Outlook.

Let me guess - she imported her contacts from the previous version. Have
her open one of the contact items representing one of the people who receive
the Rich Text messages. Double-click on the email address to open the
"E-mail Properties" dialogue. Examine the "INternet mail format" drop-down
at the bottom. It should contain "Let Outlook decide the best sending
format". If it contains "Send using Outlook Rich Text format", that's the
problem.

 

[Scot Desort]

Brian-

Thanks for the information. I advised her of your steps below and she is
going to go through all 37 contacts and see how they are configured.