How to stop Outlook 2010 from blue-underlining all text in read messages?

windows-7 microsoft-outlook microsoft-office microsoft-outlook-2010 microsoft-office-2010

16,787

Solution 1

While other answers were helpful in directing me to the final solution, ultimately this option was in another location. Settings in MS Word have no relation here at all.

Outlook -> Outlook Options -> Mail -> Editor Options -> Advanced -> Disable "Mark formatting inconsistencies".

Outlook options

Solution 2

Outlook uses Word as it's editor. So it's possible you will need to adjust Word options.

I don't have an HTML message like that to try this on, but you can check in File>Options>Advanced>Editing Options and remove the check from Mark Formatting Inconsistencies.

enter image description here

You might have to close Outlook and reopen it for a change to take place. Hope this helps you.

16,787

Mxx

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Mxx over 1 year

For some reason only some HTML-formatted emails I receive get blue-underlined like this screenshot. This problem is not with the original message, since my co-workers do not have this underline and I see can such messages normally for a couple of seconds and then see as Outlook progressively adds underlines to each word. This underline is the same style as "incorrect syntax" when composing a new message or in Word. How do I turn this off for the incoming messages?
- techturtle about 12 years
  
  If you mouse over the lines, or right click them, does it give any indication about what "error" it is trying to identify?
- Mxx about 12 years
  
  If I right-click on that text, context menu has disabled "Make this text consistent with formatting...." It looks like this.
- harrymc almost 12 years
  
  Could you please also post the message headers as described here ?
- Mxx almost 12 years
  
  Can you explain why do you want to see headers of that message?
- harrymc almost 12 years
  
  I want to see how the message was constructed and its metadata. This might not help, but it completes the picture.
- Mxx almost 12 years
  
  @harrymc your link is for older versions of outlook. in 2007 and 2010 you can get email headers without that registry here. I don't have this message anymore. However, I received another one with exactly the same problem and here are its headers pastebin.com/w0334yF3
- harrymc almost 12 years
  
  Nothing in the headers - maybe the entire message as-is will contain a clue. You could for starters Save As in msg format and post (my Outlook 2007 might or might not be able to use it). Format eml will be better, but I don't think Outlook 2010 supports it. You might need to use the trial version of MailExporter or some such equivalent product, but let us start first with the msg format.
- Mxx almost 12 years
  
  Raw html of the message does not have any underlines coded in it. I'm not going to post the message as is due to it containing company related information and I'm not going to go through all the code and try to sanitize it. Once again, that underline is not visible on the message right away. It feels like it takes a few seconds for Outlook to scan/check/whatever it before you can see them showing up line by line.
- harrymc almost 12 years
  
  The underlining does not appear on all the text. What I wanted was to compare the attributes of text with and without. You could maybe find this out. I have subscribed to O'Reilly, but received nothing yet.
Mxx about 12 years

Hmm, I just checked my Outlook and I don't have "Editing Options" in Advanced. I have that in Word, but not Outlook. And in Word both boxes are clear just like in your screenshot.
Oliver Salzburg almost 12 years

@Mxx: To my understanding, Outlook uses the Word HTML rendering engine to display HTML mails. So I wouldn't be too surprised if a setting in Word would have an affect on this.
Mxx almost 12 years

Like I said above, in Word I have that option disabled..
Mxx almost 12 years

sigh..That's what I've been telling all this time. The message itself does not have these underlines. It is something in Outlook...which is why I posted the original question.
harrymc almost 12 years

Try another Outlook profile to see whether this is really an Outlook setting.
Mxx almost 12 years

Outlook 2010 does not have /firstrun parameter. Here's a page that lists all the available options office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/… Creating a new Outlook profile also did not fix the problem. However, resetting Word's registry did. But it also nuked a bunch of my Outlook customizations. Now I'll be slowly restoring them back and see if any of those settings cuased this problem.
harrymc almost 12 years

If you find out which setting, please share it with us.
Mxx over 10 years

I'm not replying or forwarding that message. They were like that in the reading pane. Furthermore, this is not font underline. It was formatting inconsistencies like as I specified in the marked answer above.
go2null over 3 years

this disables it for Editing emails as well