Pintmaster

12Dec/063

IE7 Breaks Outlook 2003


How ridiculous does that statement look! If you were wondering why your headers stopped printing when you print your outlook email, that is the answer. By installing Internet Explorer 7, you are foregoing your right to consistently print header information in Outlook. Several people in my office were reporting that some of their emails were printing without the header info. Upon doing a search in google for the phrase "email only prints text of the message", I found the following discussion @ lockergnome

I believe this problem started when IE7 was installed as I haven't seen it on machines that still have IE6.

and then another frustrated user:

ts definitely IE7 there are so many people (not just in these forums but also in others across the net) having the same problem - me too.

Microsoft are exceptionally quiet on this front. the only known solution i've seen is to uninstall IE7 & go back to IE6. i hae tried other fixes ie re-editing HTML back into plain & then putting back to HTML - this works sometimes - but sometimes not & is very time consuming.

So, what did I do? I removed IE 7 from all of my users computers and faster than you can say "microsoft needs help", they were all printing Outlook emails with headers again.

Im in the process of reviewing Office 2007 and Windows Vista, and it wont be much different than this review.

Filed under: Bugs, How-to, Microsoft, Software, Windows Leave a comment
  • simon
    you can also use CTRL to select multiple emails and all of them will print correctly. alternatively press forward and then print the email, which will include the headers.
    Poor effort on Microsoft's behalf with this one. Needs a proper fix ASAP, or many users will be against IE7.
  • Wow, thanks for the response Clarke! That's great info. Hopefully MS releases a patch so users can print HTML mail!
  • CLarke
    http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?...

    The above discussion has an answer at the bottom which will fix your problem. However it also does not allow you to see HTML formatted emails as they were intended. So it is a catch 22 situation.

    Like you say the problem is with IE7 and its HTML printing engine and how Outlook developers are being lazy by using an existing printing engine rather than develop there own. Some might say good business practice, others might sya typical Microsoft cutting corners. Me personally I deal with a lot of Law Firm clients and the Ability to print Header INformation is just as important as the actual email content.

    "In Outlook, go to "Tools" => "options"; in the preferences tab, click "email options".

    Under message handling, check the box "Read all standard mail in plain text"

    You now need to quit Outlook and start Outlook again, and printing will be fine.

    I am confident that this will work - why - because it fixes the old problem with Outlook - when printing HTML mail, it did not print that it had an attachment - this causes it to print that information.

    You should also be able to set the browser setting back to normal and to set your margins back to normal.

    The only downside is that you will not get fancy fonts etc in the email printout.

    Note that if you change the setting back, your emails will reappear in HTML format. Thus, this option affects viewing and chooses a different print engine. (You may have to move off the mail in the preview pane and then come back to it if the current email is one of them)"
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