[techtalk] Outlook woes: some answers for Outlook 2000

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 01:18:41PM -0600 or thereabouts, Jeramia Ory wrote:
> > Actually, a brilliant FAQ entry would be:
> > I have mailer XYZ. How do I...
> 
>     As a user of Outlook Express 5.0 for Mac here in the lab, and of Outlook
> Express 5.0 for Windows at home, I would be willing to help with such an
> entry.  Also, while I hate to admit it, OE 5.0 for the Mac is the best IMAP

Cool! Well, due to popular demand (urr, like two people said they liked 
the idea :)) here's my sister's answers for Outlook 2000. She adds the 
caveat that *every version of Outlook is different* but that "playing 
around with it works. Sometimes".

I hope this helps someone: I've removed the attribution cos it's her
work address, and linuxchix gets archived, and she didn't want that
address sitting on the web. I didn't understand the answer to the
first question at all, but I have left it in in the hope that it
makes sense to Outlook users.

Deborah (my sis) said:
> Well I got it to work by playing, but I *strongly* suspect that it's
> different for every single version of Outlook.  I'm *sure* I've looked
> before, but it was *so* easy to find when I last looked that I'm 99% 
> certain it's the different version of Outlook that's making the difference.
>
> > How do you get it to let you have the quoted stuff at the top?
> 
> Well, I delete the silly header it puts in manually every time.  I haven't
> found a way to make it *automatically* reverse that.  But once you've
> persuaded it to put in >>s then it becomes *possible* to do it.
> 
> The trouble is that Outlook seems to assume pretty colours are a sufficient
> way to indicate the difference between replies and original text.  I,
> needless to say, disagree. :-)
>
> > How can you split up the parts of the quoted stuff and trim and
> > so on?
>
> You mean like this?
>
> Tools Menu, select Options.  Click on the button for 'Email Options'.
> There's a section there labelled 'On replies and forwards'.
> There's an entry each for 'When replying to a message', and 'When forwarding
> a message'.  There is a drop down box for each of these.  Set each in turn
> to read 'Prefix each line of the original message'.
> 
> With this setting selected, you now have an option just below that, which
> will magically just have ungreyed itself,  to choose just *what* you want 
> to prefix your lines with.  I set it to > obviously.  Other people can use 
> : or Banana, or whatever else their hearts might desire.
>
> The above works in Outlook 2000.  I have no proof that it works (or doesn't
> work) with any previous version of Outlook, or with Outlook Express.  I
> could probably investigate Outlook Express if people were particularly
> interested, we probably have a copy knocking around the office somewhere!
> 
> > How do do stop it sending weird formats by default? (ie: make it
> > send ASCII, not RTF or HTML).
>
> Under mail format (again, Tools menu, Options), there is an option to set
> the text type.  Mine's greyed out right now - I'm not sure why!
> 
> To change for the currently-read message, under the Format menu, there is 
> a tick box that allows you to set it to 'plain text'.  As far as I can
> ascertain, this is MS-speak for ASCII.
> 
> > (And if it has stupid line lengths, how do you make it put a
> > line break in every 72 characters or so? I dunno whether it
> > does that kind of thing correctly already, or whether it's as
> > simple as "hitting the return key" :)
> 
> Well, this is one I've been trying to work out.  Right now my current
> workaround is

[you don't want to know. Really. I'm incredulous. Basically, she keeps
a reference email from someone she knows is using a sensible line length,
resizes her window until it fits, then uses that as a guideline. This
promptly screws up any mail she gets from other Outlook users, so she
just keeps resizing to suit the person she's sending to. She doesn't
have to insert line breaks herself: what she's doing is coming out
correctly. It reminds me of years ago when I didn't know how to get > 
marks in and used to put every one in by hand. What a pain!]

Telsa



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