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**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 21, 2007, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/e-mail-being-sent-as-html-code/404951 "2007-05-21T18:02:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@Surbey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Surbey)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2007, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/e-mail-being-sent-as-html-code/404951/1 "2007-05-21T18:02:58Z")
Have you ever heard of an e-mail being sent from Outlook and being formated in HTML code? To one or two people, this womans e-mail is being received as plain HTML code instead of e-mail format. Any ideas what that might be?
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**Author:**  [@Mindfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mindfield)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2007, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/e-mail-being-sent-as-html-code/404951/2 "2007-05-21T18:34:34Z")
Most E-Mail these days is capable of being delivered and read in a few formats: Plain text, Rich Text, or HTML most commonly. Even if the message contains no RTF or HTML formatting, some E-Mail clients (and webmail clients, for that matter) can be configured to send messages always in a particular format. It’s nothing particularly nefarious and is most commonly used for common text effects (bold, italic, etc.) and inline images, though a great deal of spam uses HTML to image-spam. (Spam that contains little or no text, and whose content is contained within an image in an attempt to fool spam filters.)
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**Author:**  [@chrisk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chrisk)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2007, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/e-mail-being-sent-as-html-code/404951/3 "2007-05-21T18:47:52Z")
Also, if a few people are seeing the HTML code instead of the properly rendered output, that might be because their email clients don’t support HTML properly, or because the headers are beind mishandled. There’s an email header called content-type which signals what format the body is in.
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**Author:**  [@Rysto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysto)\
**Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/e-mail-being-sent-as-html-code/404951/4 "2007-05-22T00:56:42Z")
I believe that several HTML-capable mail clients (like Outlook) has a setting to force emails to be displayed in plain text(which will leave the HTML codes in the email as you describe). What’s the client(and the version) that’s causing the problem?
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**Author:**  [@Yag\_Rannavach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yag_Rannavach)\
**Post date:** [May 22, 2007, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/e-mail-being-sent-as-html-code/404951/5 "2007-05-22T01:54:47Z")
[QUOTE=Rysto]
I believe that several HTML-capable mail clients (like Outlook) has a setting to force emails to be displayed in plain text(which will leave the HTML codes in the email as you describe). What’s the client(and the version) that’s causing the problem?
[/QUOTE]
Yes, this is definately an option in most html capable mail clients…I always turn html emails off when I switch to a new client or webmail.