Outlook 2003 Wont "include original message text" in my email replys?

August 1, 2007 8:36 AM

Why won't Outlook 2003 "include original message text" in my email replys?

At work I have outlook setup in the standard manor of when replying to an email it "include original message text"

Thus keeping a message thread so everyone knows whats been said.

This works fine on 99% of my contacts.. however 1 or 2 for some reason when you try to reply, the actual message thread is automaticly deleted leaving just their message header (to and from etc) and their footer. Ive looked at the email and theres no hidden HTML code or anything, it seems to be some kind of default Outlook setting.

If I access my emails via our online webbased service and try replying to the same messages then the message thread is not deleted.

does anyone know what could cause this?

posted by complience to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

• Are you on an Exchange server at work, or some other type of mail server (the webmail leads me to think it's Exchange)?
• Is it contact specific, or email specific? I.e., when you reply to a certain contact, it *always* strips the original text, or is it just certain email types that tend to come predominately from those contacts?
• Does it make a difference if the mail was sent in HTML vs. plain text vs. rich text format?
• Does it matter if you attempt to forward the email to yourself?
• Is there any commonality to the mail content you can't reply to- such as signatures or boilerplate
• Can you have one of the contacts you're having problems with send you a plaintext email, and try that?

My first two thoughts are:

1. Antivirus program is interpreting their HTML or image/signature embedded emails as "unsafe", and autostripping the content when you try to reply. With webmail, this won't happen because your AV program isn't being used there.
2. Your work has some form of information rights management (IRM) that may be poorly configured or misbehaving; IRM's responsibility is to do things like allow an email to be set as "do not forward" etc, and this flag or behavior is being enforced sporadically. This seems less likely than #1, especially given that webmail works fine

posted by hincandenza at 10:26 AM on August 1, 2007

Response by poster: 1.)yes it is an Exchange server
2.)It seems to be contact specific, it only happens when I receive emails from a couple of clients from the same office (a bank as it happens)
3.) The email appears to be plain text
4.) The same thing happens for forwarded messages
5.) Ive turned off my antivirus and the same thing happens, im fairly certain its a outlook setting
6.) If it was a IRM setting you'd expect it to happen for every contact, rather than just the odd one or two.

thanks for thinking about my problems :)
posted by complience at 1:49 PM on August 1, 2007

Response by poster: Ive managed to stop outlook automaticly deleting the message thread.. but im not sure why

Tools>Options>Mail format

Unticked the box [] Use Microsoft Office word 2003 to edit e-mail messages


anyone know why that was doing it?
posted by complience at 8:48 AM on August 2, 2007

Wow- no idea. Well, at least you found your own solution, but I've not heard of that happening before. On the plus side... it's a waste to use Word as the email editor, since plaintext or rtf are fine by themselves, and having word running in the background just for email editing means extra memory and slower performance. :)
posted by hincandenza at 10:44 AM on August 2, 2007