How to disable text offset in Outlook mails?

Question

Sometimes I get mails from people with the "offset" if that's how its called. If there is no offset - everything is perfect. But if there is - then after many-many mails this offset text moves waaaaay to the right and each row in the initial mail becomes literally a 1-2 letters only. Its like mail becomes "vertical" instead of standard horizontal view. Couple of words might take several rows. It's impossible to read it like this and also Outlook hardly works with this kind of mails - it takes too long time to load them and it hangs up for a few seconds every time I scroll the correspondence.

Is there a way to bring the mail to the standard way and disable this offset for good?

Answer 1

Hi Alexander,

In order to better understand your scenario, can you provide specific screenshots?

From your description, it sounds like you are experiencing a formatting issue with your emails in Outlook, where the text appears in a vertical line one letter at a time instead of forming a horizontal sentence. This can be caused by various factors, such as incorrect font settings or display settings. Here are a few steps you can try to correct this issue:

1. Reset font settings: In the email where the text is displaying vertically, try selecting the text and changing the font settings to a standard horizontal alignment. You can adjust the font style, size, and alignment options in the formatting toolbar of Outlook.
2. Check view settings: Ensure that your Outlook email view settings are not set to display text vertically. You can navigate to the "View" tab in Outlook and check the "Reading Pane" settings to adjust how email content is displayed.
3. Clear formatting: If the text is still displaying vertically, try clearing any formatting applied to the text. Select the affected text, right-click, and choose the option to clear formatting or reset to default style.

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Answer 2

"Indent" is the right word. In Classic Outlook the option is under Mail -> "Replies and forwards", When replying to a message = "Include and indent original message text" or "Prefix each line of the original message" (which indents and adds a Blue Vertical Bar).

But your settings only apply to YOUR reply text. Any replies that were part of the original message are unchanged. And you are correct, in a long chain the first (historically) message can end up squashed.

I wrote an Outlook VBA Macro to try and fix this, but the Outlook HTML tags that controls this (<blockquote>) are so hoarked up it's almost impossible to correct. All I could do was just reduce the amount of the indent and make it the same for all the BlockQuote levels.