john said:
I get a message from my work and it no longer reads and shows it in
html . It says I need an html capable program but up until a few months
ago outlook was able to. What can I do to fix it?
HTML-formatted message *SHOULD* (but is not required) to contain both a
plain-text MIME part and an HTML MIME part. For users of e-mail clients
that don't understand HTML or have been configured to read in plain-text
mode, they still have a plain-text MIME part that is readable. Sending
HTML-formatted e-mails without a plain-text MIME part can raise the
threshold that the message gets tagged as spam and never delivered to
the recipient. A "good" HTML-formatted e-mail should look like in the
body of the message:
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_0001_01C4F70D.B47E5430
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
<plain-text version of the message>
------=_NextPart_000_0001_01C4F70D.B47E5430
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<HTML version of the message>
The charset and encoding might be different but note there are 2 MIME
parts where one is text/plain and the other is text/html. That's why
sending simple messages in HTML is sloppy because you are duplicating
the message twice and wasting twice the disk space to store it and using
twice the bandwidth to send it. If you send a simple message, like a
memo, then just use plain-text mode, and use HTML only when formatting
is needed to convey additional communication not easily or perhaps not
even possible using just plain text.
If a "good" HTML-formatted e-mail had been sent to you from work then
you would still be able to read the plain-text portion of it (although
you can still read the HTML which is all text but the tags make it
difficult to parse out the content from the control and formatting).
What e-mail clients are being used at work for you to be receiving
e-mails from there? I know Hotmail doesn't include the text/plain MIME
part in HTML-formatted e-mails (and why Hotmail messages sometimes don't
get past spam filters) but whatever e-mail client you use at work should
be adding the text/plain part in addition to the text/html part.
If you configured Outlook to read in plain-text mode only, you might
only be able to read the e-mail if it includes a plain/text part. I
don't know if OL2003 provides an option to let the user select to read
in plain-text mode only. In OL2002, it is a registry hack (although
some tools, like Attachment Options, make it an option to do the
registry hack for you). I thought Outlook had an HTML-to-text converter
that it called if there was no plain/text part, like the html.iec file
(Microsoft HTML Converter). Maybe it is missing, corrupted, or
infected. Have you ran a full scan using a recently anti-virus program,
along with scans using anti-spyware tools, like Ad-Aware and Spybot?
Have you yet tried using the Detect and Repair (under the Help menu)?
