Replying in Outlook

Get Outlook to play nicely with the other children.

Sometimes people send us emails from Microsoft Outlook which are difficult to read and reply to. The problem is with Outlook itself which doesn’t follow standard internet rules and so doesn’t work well with other mail programs (even other mail programs written by Microsoft).
Since we don’t use Outlook, and instead use a range of other tools to read, archive and file emails, this sometimes causes problems. You might suggest that we just use Outlook, but then we would have to give up using OSX, Unix and Linux, automated systems to track the progress of customer requests, archiving systems and mail programs which give us greater flexibility than Microsoft products would.

I am often impressed by the lengths Outlook users go to in order to reply to emails and have people figure out who wrote what. All CAPS, colours and all sorts of impossible to read variations. You put your replies in blue mixed into my email; am I supposed to then reply in red? And when you reply again, what colour do you pick this time. Or if you reply in all CAPS how do I make my capitals bigger than yours?

Luckily there are simple solutions. Firstly, you can download a tool which makes Outlook behave properly when replying to emails. Now everyone can clearly understand what you are saying. It is very simple and doesn’t get in your way at all.

Secondly, there are a couple of simple settings in Outlook which help a lot.

Setting Outlook to quote text properly

The following images relate to Microsoft Outlook 2000.

To set the options, start Microsoft Outlook and select the menu item Tools, subitem Options…. You should see the following window:

Outlook options dialog

Select “E-mail Options…”, and you should see:

Outlook quoting options

The second half of this window is what interests us: select Prefix each line of the original message both for replying and forwarding. The field Prefix each line with is tricky: for best effect, it should contain the > character followed by a space. Microsoft Outlook can’t show this trailing space, but it does handle it correctly if you enter it.

If you reply in all CAPS instead, then it is impossible for the next person to reply to your reply, unless they somehow invent bigger CAPS than yours. If you use colour, not only will the effect be lost on people who strip all that spam friendly html email, but copy and paste doesn’t work right, printing to b&w lasers is dreadful and it can be hard to remember who is what colour.

Of course, you can just shout “This isn’t my problem. You should just use Outlook.” You could, but that isn’t very helpful if your goal in writing email is to be understood by everyone you write to. Using these standards doesn’t inconvenience anyone who also uses Outlook like you and it helps to avoid any miscommunications.

Acknkowledgements are due to Greg Lehey.