Outlook: Force Plain Text Reading of Email

Contributed by MickeyMouse August 21, 2006  
Tagged: Microsoft Outlook

HTML emails can be pretty but can increase your chance of getting a virus or exposing your email address to spam. You can reduce these risks by forcing outlook to only display incoming emails in plain text.

As Outlook has progressed, its defenses against viruses and spam has improved. Still, reading email in html instead of plain text increases your risk of validating your email address to spammers or downloading a virus.

Here’s how to disable the reading of emails in html in Outlook 2003 and greater:

1. Open Outlook
2. Click Tools
3. Click Options
4. Select Preferences tab
5. Select E-Mail Options
6. Click Read all standard mail in plain text
7. Click OK x 2

If you have the earlier Office XP, you can do this with a registry hack:

In regedit navigate to…

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

Add a dword called ReadAsPlain with a value of 1.