Special Edition Using Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 4.0

Choosing HTML or Plain Text as Your Message Format

Each time you compose a message by using Outlook Express, you choose whether to use plain text only or to add graphics, colors, and rich text formatting by using HTML. If most of your messages go to users of Outlook Express or other HTML-compatible mail programs, rich text formatting can make your messages livelier and more readable. With HTML formatting, your messages look and behave like web pages; you can specify fonts and their sizes, change text colors, use paragraph styles, and control text alignment. You can add background colors and graphics, bulleted and numbered lists, and hypertext links to other web pages.

All that fancy formatting is lost, though, if your correspondents use email ...