in outlook.com, how to disable in-line font delimiter interpretation of * and _ for bold and italics, respectively

'use another program' is definitely a solution to the problem, as you suggest

or, at least, another email system. 

for example,  my gmail account doesn't have this abhorrent feature that can't be disabled.   

gmail also seem to listen to end-users, rather than pushing this to a 'contact your local systems administrator, or hope someone in the community has a solution' as this site does.  good grief.

abandoning outlook seems like the reasonable way to having functional email for those of us who work in symbols and who don't want parsed fontfaces and emojis.  

i hope you and ms can sense my aggravation about this.

The only thing I can think of that would help is to put the formula in Notepad ++ or a similar application and copy paste as RTF. That should keep the formatting from changing.

Hello my name is Michael and I am an independent advisor and an Office user as well. I might be able to lend a hand. Unfortunately there is not a way to turn off interpretation for Outlook. Outlook does that same thing with code when trying to send code snippets to my colleagues. To get around this we use a code snippet box. This might help:

1. Open a new email
2. Click on Insert > Object
3. On object menu make sure ‘Create New’ tab is selected
4. Select ‘OpenDocument Text’ under object type

5, Click OK

A box with thick border is added on message area

Add all formatted code in the box and click out side. This box will be ignored from being interpreted from Outlook. I hope that helps.

That is great, have you tested it by the way?

Hi Michael.  Thanks for the response.

are these instructions for the OUTLOOK app? I'm using outlook.com i.e. the webmail interface  which does not have an insert menu. 

If not, could you tell me where 'Insert > Object' is in my toolbar?  What I have looks like this:

FYI, I asked this in the wrong forum earlier.  I did not realize this question belonged in the 'outlook.com' heading rather than the 'office 365' heading; the URL i navigate to is actually 'outlook.office365.com' which makes it very confusing.

Anyway, someone there told me how to disable it within the outlook app. It may be of use to you so you can stop your embedded object code snippet approach.  

See:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_outlook-mso_other-msoversion_other/in-office365-outlook-via-web-browser-how-to/9a47f7d2-3ffc-4237-bdce-d30f85bed664?tm=1599857091065