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It’s hard to think of anything that would fit the pattern. Does the user have any antispam or other filtering software that might be firing up at startup but then later be turned off, either manually or automatically?

AVG 9.0 and Spysweeper. Those have been on the computer for a long time, before the Outlook problem started. I’ll have to check the update history, though.

The reason I think it is user-based is that it is not occurring on every machine… the point that it only happens on a few suggests it may be a more of a desktop issue?

Backing up this thought is a discovery I made this morning, something I’ve been trying for a long time to catch.

The main problem computer was off for a week while the person was on vacation. I was watching the incoming messages with Outlook Web Access, and everything looked fine. This morning she turns on the computer, loads Outlook, and the HTML is magically stripped form the messages, even as seen from Outlook Web Access.

This is the most detailed information I’ve found to date. It seems clear that Outlook is stripping the formatting and writing it back to the Exchange store. BUT ONLY FOR MESSAGES THAT ARRIVED WHEN THE COMPUTER WAS OFF!

So what does Outlook do differently with these messages? Or could Exchange still be involved somehow?

Could the Out of Office Assistant be involved somehow?

Hmmm. That sounds just odd enough to be a possibility. I’ll have a look the next time I’m onsite. Not much to see using Outlook Web Access.

Just a thought… sometimes users change options in Outlook not realizing the consequence… check this link out from MS MS Plain Text Option

Every setting I can find is set correctly. Plus, messages that are delivered while Outlook is online are unaffected.

I keep thinking it’s some sort of Exchange/Outlook interaction, but I can’t find any clues to point me in a useful direction.

Sorry I misinterpreted that. I believe that when most email programs compose an HTML format message, they attach the HTML code as an attachment, and include the text in the message body. Mail agents that understand HTML use the HTML version, while mail agents that don’t (such as my Windows Mobile ActiveSync client) display the text body. Which leads to this thought: perhaps a security filter or something else is stripping the HTML attachment?

As it happens, the most common case involves order forms from the company’s online shopping cart, which I set up. The HTML is definitely part of the message body, not attached. The shopping cart has been that way for 5 years, and worked fine until maybe 3-6 months ago. There have been no version upgrades in Outlook or Exchange, just maintenance updates.

The person most often affected is not a mobile user at all, and doesn’t even use Outlook Remote Access. I treat her and two others as kind of a “control group” because they are all copied on a certain html-formatted order form that shows up several times a week.. One of the three sees the problem occasionally, one has only seen it twice, and one has never seen it at all.

A few others in the office have seen this once or twice, not enough to spot a pattern.

I have turned on Outlook logging, but nothing unusual shows up for the affected messages. Nothing in the Exchange logs, either.

To be clear, it’s not that the html source is displayed. Rather, all the html tags have been stripped from the message, leaving only the text.