Hi to everyone. I am running Outlook 2007 under Vista 32 and over the past couple of days my emails have been going out in MIME format, which to a human reader is gibberish. The message is legible but it is surrounded by what might be ASCII code. Any attachements are being reduced to gibberish also. I've researched the web for a solution and, whilst several people have the same problem, no one seems to know the answer. It is happening whether I send in plain text, rich text or html.
Right-click | Properties on one of the recipients and see if there's a checkbox along the lines of "Always send to this recipient in Microsoft Rich Text format" (going from memory here). You want that off.
Thanks folks, but I've been sending mail and attachments to myself in all 3 formats and it's happening all the time. Could be my ISP (Sky,Com) which is causing it?
It shouldn't be -- the presence of that winmail.dat attachment indicates that it's being created in Rich Text format, regardless of what you're telling Outlook to do. Generally that happens because Outlook is seeing a contact or address book entry which is configured to override the other preferences.
I'll PM you an email address -- try this:
Create a new email in Outlook and make sure it's set to either Plain Text or HTML.
Type the address I send you into the To: field. Don't include any other recipients.
Set the subject to "VirtualDr Test" so I know to look for it (this address gets a whole bunch of junk).
Type a couple of words into the body, and attach a small picture of some sort (just right-click | Save Image As the VirtualDr logo above if you don't have anything handy).
Send it.
I'll let you know what it looks like when it gets to me. If it comes through fine then it's gotta be a per-recipient thing since your Outlook doesn't know me yet. If it's broken for me then it'll be something more global.
The email came through to me in plain text with my avatar as an attachment (see screenshot with personal info removed). So it's definitely not a global thing.
Try this:
Start to send a message to yourself, as you have been during testing. Do everything except actually sending it.
Press Ctrl-K. This forces Outlook to do its usual lookups on the recipients, if it hasn't got to it already.
Right-click on your entry in the To: field and click Outlook Properties.
If you're now looking at a dialog called "E-mail Properties", go on to the next step. Otherwise, you should be looking at a Contacts record. In that case, right-click on the underlined email address and click Outlook Properties again to get to the "E-mail Properties" dialog.
Look at the value of the Internet Format field. Normally that should be set to "Let Outlook decide the best sending format", which will generally use whatever you configure globally in Outlook. But I'm betting for you it says "Send using Outlook Rich Text Format" instead.
The member on this site (pretty sure he's in the UK) was reporting a very similar situation. He posted back and said the issue was with his ISP...He's using Sky.com
Thanks, Tuttle for all your help. The problem seems to have spontaneously corrected itself. Perhaps it was the ISP as Steve Jones suggested. Incidentally, when I use CTRL K I get an 'Insert Hyperlink' dialog box. My Outlook has 'Let Outlook decide the best sending format'. I'll probably never know why it went haywire, but thanks again to you and everyone.
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