Forcing Outlook 2003 Not To Use Rich Text (WINMAIL.DAT)

S

splounx

Hi there,

I'm having a problem with my Outlook 2003 (which many others appear to
be having as well) whereby Outlook insists on sending some messages as
Outlook Rich Text Format, and of course non-Outlook recipients receive
a message with the infamous WINMAIL.DAT attachment.

I had imported my Contacts from Outlook 2000, and I believe that
somewhere during the export & import process, the Internet format for
the e-mail addresses of all my contacts (which you can view in the
E-mail Properties dialog box, by double-clicking a contact's e-mail
address) was set to "Send using Outlook Rich Text Format"!

I have checked my Outlook Options and under the Mail Format tab (a) my
Message format is set to HTML and (b) under Internet Format, Outlook
Rich Text options is set to "Convert to HTML format". Neither of
these settings however seem to conquer Outlook Rich Text! My
colleagues still complain about receiving WINMAIL.DAT files when I try
to send them attachments.

Needless to say, this is pretty infuriating. Short of changing the
Internet format setting for every e-mail address in my more than 600
Contacts, can anyone suggest another way to force Outlook 2003 to
unconditionally and consistently use HTML format? A magic registry
setting perhaps? ;-) Any help is appreciated.

splounx, a very frustrated (and hopeful!) Outlook User
 
N

neo [mvp outlook]

Do you use a PDA? I seem to recall that some older versions of sync
software will force messages to Outlook Rich Text even though options set
elsewhere was for plain text or html. (This behavior seemed to happen
during every sync operation.)
 
J

Jose

Have you verified that this is happening only for the
contacts that are specified as "Send using Microsoft
Outlook Rich Text Format"?

If that's the case, the general settings in Outlook will
not affect your results on those. Outlook first looks if
there's a special setting on the recipient (such as send
using rich text format), THEN if no per-recipient
settings are set Outlook will give results based on the
general settings.

Jose
 

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