Hotmail wtf? with message reply formatting

March 5, 2008 7:09 PM

Wtf up with Hotmail and the right angle bracket character it used to quote the text of a message you're replying to?

My buddy and I both have Hotmail e-mail accounts. I have Windows Live Hotmail.

It used to be that if I got a mail from him and clicked Reply, his message would come up like so:

>buddy's text
>
>

------
and then I would add my text like so

>buddy's text
>
>
my response text

-----
and send it to him and he would see:

>>buddy's text
>>
>>
> my response text

Great, simple, no complaints. But now when I reply I get the arrows but when I send the mail, he doesn't see them. He's got to mark my response text himself.

Good grief.

Is there a way to get back the old way of doing things. This really sucks when this newfangled b.s. can't even get the old simple stuff right.

posted by storybored to computers & internet (7 comments total)

It's probably some auto-formatting junk in hotmail. Are you sending your messages in plain text mode? Is he viewing them in plain text mode?

Whoever decided to cruft up email with HTML mode was ruining a good thing.
posted by chrisamiller at 7:45 PM on March 5 [2 favorites]

Thanks for your reply, Chris. In Windows Live Hotmail, I don't seem to have the option of selecting Plain Text!

I could do it in the old non-Live version by clicking on a link near the top.
posted by storybored at 8:52 PM on March 5

Backup question: Do other webmail offerings have the same difficulty handling this simple task?
posted by storybored at 8:53 PM on March 5

I have given up on things like sensible quoting in reply email. Honestly. 99% of people you write to are going to just quote the whole mess and top-reply anyway. I'm learning to let go... sort of. (weeps quietly)

Anyway, I don't use webmail but I suggest you use an actual email client in plain text mode -- Hotmail lets you use POP3, right?
posted by loiseau at 9:12 PM on March 5

Hotmail lets you use POP3, right?

No, but you can download it using something like FreePOPs

Do other webmail offerings have the same difficulty handling this simple task?

Gmail doesn't have this problem.
posted by chrisamiller at 11:34 PM on March 5

Gmail is like Hotmail for grownups. It just works.
posted by flabdablet at 12:46 AM on March 6

Oh yeah: and it has IMAP access as well as POP3, and if you want to sync with your Gmail address book live, there's GCALDaemon which will let you do that via LDAP.
posted by flabdablet at 12:49 AM on March 6