Gray backgrounds in Outlook e-mail

May 30, 2006 10:23 PM

E-mails I receive and compose in Microsoft Outlook 2003 have inexplicably and recently begun to be displayed with a gray background!

A couple of days ago, my incoming and composed e-mails began to display with a gray background, making them hard to read. It may be limited to HTML-formatted or Rich Text e-mails, hard to say. I don't know if e-mails I send arrive to the recipient with the gray background.

I may have done something dumb to activate this effect, but I've looked through the myriad Outlook preferences and tools windows hidden throughout the app (including Stationery), and I can't find anything to reverse the effect. And yes, the effect persists if I restart the app and/or computer.

How can I get my normal white background back?

My system has 2GB of RAM, so I don't think it's memory-related.

posted by wubbie to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Update: it definitely appears to only happen with HTML-formatted e-mails--I went through some older messages that were filed away, and any message that had any sort of formatting applied to it (fonts, colors, etc.) now appears with the gray background.

Plain-text messages have a white background.
posted by wubbie at 10:31 PM on May 30, 2006

Ugh, Update #2: I figured it out. I had unchecked "Use Windows Colors" in Microsoft INTERNET EXPLORER, which for some reason affected e-mail display in OUTLOOK.

Microsoft, you suck.
posted by wubbie at 10:35 PM on May 30, 2006

It's beause Outlook is using an IE control to render HTML mail. Even text mail is being internally translated into HTML and rendered as such (which is why URLs in text email are clickable).
posted by aubilenon at 11:06 PM on May 30, 2006

Why would MS spend time building another browser or hacked up version of IE when they can include the IE components right in Outlook to render your HTML?

Ergo, some of your settings travel with it.

Join the Office 2007 Beta 2 and see what they've done to it, and bitch while it may still influence things. I'm actually *very* impressed with Office 2007's interface.
posted by disillusioned at 2:14 AM on May 31, 2006

Microsoft, you suck.

Brilliant. Well done.
posted by ed\26h at 2:24 AM on May 31, 2006

I can understand Microsoft wanting to repurpose bits of common code across applications to streamline functionality, but the result looks like nothing more than an error, and certainly isn't well documented in either application.

Nowhere in Internet Explorer do I have "gray background" set as a preference, nor does checking "Use Windows Colors" in the browser cause web pages to display with a medium/dark gray background -- hence my confusion as to why this would cause that effect in my e-mail app. It wasn't even "web standard" gray from the old Netscape days, it was dark enough to cause text to be hard to read.
posted by wubbie at 9:47 AM on May 31, 2006