How does outlook know what format to display an email?

[Richard Lewis Haggard]

I'm a developer in a company that makes software that encrypts email messages and am working on a bug that says that if an email was created in Outlook in Rich Text format and has elements in it like a table then the Rich Text formating is lost upon receipt of the email. It looks like Outlook is looking at the encrypted email and deciding that it must be text and all formatting is lost. The actual data itself is still present in the received email and is displayed in simple Text format but the Rich Text formatting is lost.

So, the real question is 'How does Outlook know what sort of formatting is to be applied to an incoming email?' Outlook is normally pretty good about discriminating between text, rich text and HTML, but what is the mechanism by which such logic is performed? What fields in the email let Outlook determine what sort of formatting is to be used to display the email?

Thanks

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]]

I'm a developer in a company that makes software that encrypts email
messages and am working on a bug that says that if an email was created in
Outlook in Rich Text format and has elements in it like a table then the
Rich Text formating is lost upon receipt of the email. It looks like Outlook
is looking at the encrypted email and deciding that it must be text and all
formatting is lost. The actual data itself is still present in the received
email and is displayed in simple Text format but the Rich Text formatting is
lost.

Your formatting is lost as well. Each paragraph is one big long line with no
line wraps. Contact the admins at outlookforums.com and tell them thet have a
problem. In the meantime, be sure to press Enter at the end of each line.

So, the real question is 'How does Outlook know what sort of formatting is
to be applied to an incoming email?' Outlook is normally pretty good about
discriminating between text, rich text and HTML, but what is the mechanism
by which such logic is performed? What fields in the email let Outlook
determine what sort of formatting is to be used to display the email?

It uses the MIME headers, just like other mail clients.

 

[Richard Lewis Haggard]

And what header values would that be? Details, please, if you know them.

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Richard Lewis Haggard
General: www.Haggard-And-Associates.com
Please come visit here for thousands of good giggles!:
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[Leonard Agoado]

And what header values would that be? Details, please, if you know
them.

Richard,

Frequently asked questions about MIME and content conversion
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/836555

Frequently asked questions about MIME and content conversion
http://mailformat.dan.info/headers/mime.html


Regards,

Len Agoado
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Richard Lewis Haggard]

Excellent! Now THAT was a useful response and I thank you for it.