How To Make Outlook 2002/2003 Play Nice at Freelists
~~ by Greg Chapman, Senior Systems Engineer
NOTE FROM LINDA:
Greg wrote this tutorial for the members of my MSO email
support group at freelists because many of the members kept posting that
links that were shared were bad, etc. Well, the links were NOT bad but
in the process of freelists' server converting Outlook 2002 email, these "="
and "=20" signs kept being inserted at the end of lines and if a link was
long, it was full of them. But, Greg saved the day and figured out the
fix for us, so I asked him to share it here in case any others here have
seen this problem when posting to any plain text lists. This fix
DEFINITELY works and my MSO group is proof of it :-)
This article is separated into 4 parts:
PROBLEM - Brief summary of the observed problem
DESCRIPTION - Summary of behavior to match this problem against what you
may be experiencing
RESOLUTION - Steps you can take in order to correct the problem
HISTORY - Cleaning up from previous attempts to fix the problem.
PROBLEM:
Messages sent to freelists.org lists often have extra characters inserted
at the ends of lines.
DESCRIPTION:
Freelists, like many subscription based messaging systems, is designed to
work with plain text messages as described in RFC2646 (
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2646.txt ). There are many
'stylistic' issues with plain text, though. Amongst them is control of line
breaks. Without this control (or a proper semblance of it) a writer's
attempts to confine a paragraph to 76 characters (standard shell screen
width) can cause paragraph structure to fall apart as it is rendered on
other systems.
Outlook XP is set by default to use Base 64 encoded text, part of the MIME
specification (RFC2045 -
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2045.txt) and this is the source of
unusual line breaks (lines terminated with '=' and '=20' characters when
sending mail to freelists.org. By no means is this to say that Freelists'
mail processor doesn't have compliancy issues since it is supposed to
cleanly support Quoted-Printable and Base 64 encoded text. However, those
extra characters are a huge annoyance and, up to now, Outlook XP users have
been largely unsuccessful in using Outlook to post clean, readable messages
to Freelists.
In older versions of Outlook, users could control text depending on whether
Outlook was in Corporate Workgroup mode or in Internet Only mode.
Corporate Workgroup mode users had no control of the text output. Internet
Only users had a variety of options by which the output text encoding was
controlled. With the introduction of Outlook XP, the ability to switch modes
disappeared and, with it, so did most of the ability to control plain text
formatting in a message. Also in Outlook XP, a new mechanism called
Intelligent Encoding was introduced. Intelligent Encoding works on this
logical flow:
- Clients attached to an Exchange Server use the format specified at the
server
- Clients attached to an Exchange Server use the same rule set as would
Exchange Server. From MSKB article 278134 - "Outlook 2002 encodes each plain
text body part for which Outlook creates Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME) by using the same algorithm that Exchange servers use to
send plain text to the Internet. In general, if 25 percent or more of the
message is comprised of 8-bit characters, Outlook uses Base 64 encoding,
otherwise Outlook uses Quoted-Printable encoding."
RESOLUTION:
Outlook XP will ignore the algorithm by which it decides to change the
encoding of text and can also be set to consistently follow a single
specification. There is no interface provide for this, though, and can only
be implemented through a registry setting.
Note that making mistakes in the registry is generally not a good thing.
It is possible to make a mistake which will render a system useless.
Follow the guidelines for registry editing in MSKB article "256986
Description of the Microsoft Windows Registry"
1. Close Outlook and go to the Start menu and click on run. Type regedit and
click OK to open your registry editor.
2. Look for the registry key
HEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Options\Mail
(If you are using Outlook 2003, change the 10.0 to
11.0)
3. If the DWORD value InternetMailTextEncoding doesn't exist, create it.
4. The following values change Outlook XPs behavior in this fashion (from
MSKB article 278134," OL2002: How Outlook Applies Encoding to Plain Text
Messages")-
If the value data is 0, Outlook is set to Encode Intelligently.
If the value data is 1, Outlook uses Quoted-Printable encoding.
If the value data is 2, Outlook uses Base 64 encoding.
If the value data is 3, Outlook uses no encoding and leaves 8-bit characters
as 8-bit characters.
Setting the value to 3 will ensure that no encoding will be applied to
messages composed in plain text. This will allow your posts to Freelists to
remain clean of unwanted characters.
5. Exit the registry editor and open Outlook and your problem should be
solved.
HISTORY:
If you've been mucking about with Outlook XP in an attempt to control
this hair-tearing little annoyance, you can easily undo all your changes by
going to the Tools menu and choosing Otions->Mail Format->Internet Format
and clicking the Restore Defaults button. Then, change the outbound format
back to plain text. In the "automatically wrap lines at" input, change the
value to be at least 72 characters (76 is standard) and then click OK and OK
again. Close Outlook XP and restart it. Come back to this article and set
the above described Registry key and DWORD value.
<<<back to contents
Greg Chapman is a Microsoft MVP, Senior
Systems Engineer, developer, private pilot, luthier, musician and dad.
When Greg's not flying or helping to solve the latest teenager crisis, he
gets his jollies from finding the unusual stuff in Windows, wrestling with
some obscure technical issues or beta testing games and simulators. His
freelance work through
MouseTrax Computing Solutions allows him to exercise these passions to
their fullest.
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