On Fri, 5 May 2000, Winship wrote:

>> Is that actually the mailer program they are using, Internet Mail Service, or
>> are they using Outlook or Outlook express to interface to it?
>
>That is what is shown in her headers, all the info I had at the time.  She
>has since said she is using Outlook '98 and says she has choice of plain,
>Word, HTML and Rich Text.

Internet Mailer Service is essentially Microsoft Exchange Server.  You
need a client program to use it; it doesn't have to be Outlook, but
Outlook is the client of choice.

This is a UNIX account, but my other E-mail account at the University
of Kansas, that I use for most of my work-related E-mail, is a
Microsoft Exchange Server account, and I use Outlook as a client for
it.  I *don't* use Word as an E-mail composer (Outlook has a perfectly
good one of its own) so I don't know whether this helps any, but the
few pieces of E-mail that I've sent from my Exchange account to this
account are formatted as plain text.  Outlook does offer you a choice
of plain text, rich text, or HTML; messages sent to addressses outside
of the server appear to default to plain text if there's no formatting
and to one of the other two if there is.

Other than that, Outlook doesn't give you a way of setting your
content-type.  I have not yet seen anything that controls whether
multipart is sent out, and I've never (yet) sent out a multipart
message.

>She is composing in Word and says she has a
>pull down where she clicks on plain text in Word.  Then she clicks on one
>of the four above.  I suspect some other setting in Word but don't know as
>haven't used Word since about '92 and very little then.

I'm only guessing, but I'll bet the problem is her use of Word as the
E-mail composer.  If you're using Word as an editor, it formats
everything you type with at least its default formatting and then
strips the formatting out if you save it as text.  There's a pull-down
in the Outlook message composer that gives you plain text, but I don't
know of any such pull-down in Word.  And if Outlook receives formatted
text from Word, I would expect it to send it to Exchange as formatted
text.

Since I am not about to use Word as an E-mail composer, and that would
be the only way to come up with the information to answer your
question, I'm afraid I can't be of any more help.

Dennis

>
>She sent me a little note, each supposedly done in Word with the "plain"
>for Word, using each of the four for Outlook.  All were sent as multipart/
>alternative.  In looking at the HTML part of each there is a little
>difference for each of the formats, but HTML part is always there.