Outlook drops html formatting on incoming messages

stumped

[teylyn]

Hi all,
for quite a while now Outlook 2002 (on Acer laptop with XP SP2) has me stumped. Incoming emails with html formatting are displayed fine when I read them. But when I handle them, like flag, forward or respond, the original email in my Inbox loses its html formatting and is displayed as plain text.
Our email system runs with IMAP, MDaemon and Outlook connector. When I look at my emails in WorldClient, the html is also gone, message displays as plain text.

BUT

when I use ACT! 2005 (the CRM software) to access my email, the html formatting is still intact.

Duhh?

I've googled the web for clues, but no go, I'm religiously installing MS updates as they become available.

cheers

Tey

[bill]

In Outlook 2003 I set HTML mail reading preferences here:

Tools ¦ Options... ¦ Preferences ¦ Read all standard mail in plain text (checkbox)

[teylyn]

Hi Bill,
thanks for your reply.

The thing is that I want to retain the html format but Outlook takes it away for some reason.

Messages that I just read and then leave alone will continue to show their html formatting, but messages that I reply to or forward will drop their formatting.

Any ideas anyone?

Tey

[bill]

There's also a few settings here:

Tools ¦ Options... ¦ Mail Format (tab)

You can set your message composition options here. Is it possible you have this set to Plain Text or Rich Text instead of HTML?

[teylyn]

Nope, all my settings are pointing to HTML, composing and reading messages. I steer clear of using MS Word for either composing or reading.

If I forward or reply to a message, the newly created message retains the HTML formatting and looks fine. But after I have sent the reply or the forward, the original message that is still in my Inbox is changed to plain text.

Can you picture it?

[bill]

That's a tough one. It's got to be related to your IMAP setup. Outlook is notoriously problematic with IMAP. I've tried to get IMAP working properly with Outlook and various e-mail services, but I've always had to stop and go back to POP3.

I don't see anything in the MS KB [support.microsoft.com] about this. Do you have all the service packs and hotfixes for your version of Outlook?

[teylyn]

Hi all,

I thought I'd owe you this one: I found the solution for this problem which I posted earlier this year.

Apparently the Outlook Connector for Mdaemon has some severe incompatibilities with plug-ins, one of them being Google Desktop. Switching Google desktop search off for the email, calendar, tasks, etc. and unchecking the plug-in and add-in in the respective Outlook dialog boxes made the problem go away.

Of course, now my emails won't be searched by Google Desktop, either, but I can live with that.

Thought you'd be interested.

cheers

[edited by: bill at 4:00 am (utc) on July 5, 2007]
[edit reason] tidy up [/edit]

[bill]

Thank you very much for following up on this one teylyn. You had me stumped.

How did you find out that the culprit was Google Desktop Search?

[teylyn]

Hi Bill,
finally had the bright idea to go and look for an answer on the Alt-N pages. Their forum pages apparently don't make it into the search results of Google, but I browsed around and found several people with the same problem, and the explanation that some add-ins including Google Desktop are not compatible with Outlook Connector for MDaemon.

Cheers