To control line length in Internet messages in Microsoft Outlook

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To control line length in Internet messages

Line length is an issue in plain text format messages and in rich-text format (RTF) messages sent to recipients whose entries in your address book are not set up for RTF. It is not an issue in HTML messages, unless you send an HTML message to someone whose mail program can't display HTML (like Outlook 97).

Mail sent via the Internet may use a "content-transfer-encoding" called "quoted-printable," which does not have a fixed line length. Some e-mail programs cannot wrap "quoted-printable" text and, therefore, display it all as one lone line.

On the other hand, if you send mail using a fixed line length, when recipients reply and using Internet-style quoting, the resulting message may have lines that wrap with just one or two words on a line.

Note that the plain text line length settings are totally broken in Outlook 2002, we can offer no instructions for that version.

Outlook 2003 | Outlook 2000 and Outlook 98 | Outlook 97 | More Information |

Outlook 2003

The default setting for Outlook 2003 is to insert a hard return at the end of each line in a plain text message. This causes long URLs (ironically including many at microsoft.com) to be unusable in the received message. You can turn off these hard returns (and, by default, use quoted-printable encoding) by adding a WrapLines entry to the Windows registry, as described in this MSKB article:

Line Wrapping Does Not Appear As Expected When You Send E-Mail Messages in Outlook 2003

This article also describes how to control the Internet encoding and the line length if you want hard returns at the ends of lines in plain text messages.

Outlook 2000 and 98

In Corporate/Workgroup mode, choose Tools | Options | Internet E-mail and set options as described below.

In Internet Mail Only mode, choose Tools | Options | Mail Format | Settings and set options as described below.

To set a fixed line length:

Set Encode text using to None.
Set the line length. The default is 76 characters. Using a shorter line length will probably make your messages look better when people reply to them.

To use quoted-printable (no fixed length):

Set Encode text using to Quoted Printable.

Outlook 97

The original Internet Mail service in Outlook 97 uses only quoted-printable for plain text messages. To be able to set a fixed line length, you must upgrade to version 8.02 or later or download the Internet Mail Enhancement Patch.

To set the fixed line length (IMEP):

Choose Tools | Options | Internet E-mail.
Check the box for When sending messages, wrap text at xx characters.
Set the line length.

I'm not sure that Outlook 97 with IMEP has a quoted-printable option. I think that if you clear the box in Step 2 above, Outlook 97 defaults to a fixed 75-character line.

More Information

Internet Mail Issues with Microsoft Outlook

Updated Feb 15 2009