Guys, I know no one here likes HTML messages in email, but the fact of life is that people are going to be using them, no matter what we like.

That being said, I have one user (a senior VP) who's having problems with his Outlook 2003. First, there's ONE person he corresponds with at another company, who, when they reply to a message of his, the reply doesn't show any reply text. We know there's reply text, because my user gets copies of all his email on his Blackberry and there's reply text there. Now, I've looked everywhere, but I can't see any reply text in his Outlook version of the reply message.

Second problem (which may be related for all I know): Whenever he tries to send an email in any format, other than HTML (or maybe RichText) he gets a Microsoft error popping up that says "unspecified error" but doesn't give any real information. No error codes or anything. He *is* using MS Word to edit his messages, but using the built-in editor gives the same error.

Anyone here have any suggestions, other than uninstalling and reinstalling everything? That's not an option as we don't have the original install media any longer (the user's laptop predates my joining the company over 2 years ago.)

Thanks, folks!

Ok, obvious stuff first. Have you tried a detect and repair in outlook?

Have you tried renaming his profile folder (with him logged out before) and creating a new profile? You can always rename the old one back to get his settings back if that doesn't fix the problem, but it will tell us if it is a computer problem, or a profile specific one.

Hmm.. Nope, Guess I oughta try those. I'm assuming you mean new Outlook profile? I'll give that a shot.

I was actually referring to their user profile in Windows, but it wouldn't hurt to try creating a new Outlook profile first as well.

I would start with the basics for email and work up from there for HTML and Word as the editor. Drop all the settings back to Plain Text for viewing/reading email as well as when creating one (separate settings for both) and see if that displays the text when replying to an email.

Some setups may block images in HTML messages or certain content also. Is there an Anti-Virus/Anti-spam program running that is blocking this? Does the user have webmail and does text appear when replying to this certain email (webmail will usually be plain text for the most part hopefully).

Create a duplicate Outlook account on another machine and see if is it machine-specific or profile-specific. Then you will know if you need to repair Outlook or the profile or settings within Outlook. Good luck.