I have over 800 users running Outlook 98. Most of the machines are P200's with 64meg. We have a company image for each model, each department, including Office 97 and Outlook 98. The person who created the images (gone now) found a way to lock the Outlook mail format in Microsoft Outlook Rich Text. When you are running Outlook 98, and click on Tools, Options, Mail Format, the selection window is grayed out. It can't be changed to other mail formats. We don't need users sending mail in HTML, clients may have trouble ... but ... one user wants this option back. I have searched the registry for anything regarding this feature to no avail. I have completely removed Outlook 98 and reinstalled it seperately, but it still picks up this key and locks the mail format. Any Outlook guru's out there?

When a message is sent from Outlook in RTF format, Outlook attaches a file named winmail.dat. This file is used for transmitting the RTF-specific formatting information. If the recipient opens the email in Outlook they will not see the attachment. Additionally, default behaviour of Exchange Server 5.5 appears to strip the attachment from messages going to recipients external to the organization. In the situation of an Outlook user with a POP3/SMTP account (such as their ISP) sending a message to someone who uses an email client other than Outlook (a Hotmail account for example) the recipient will see winmail.dat listed as an attachment. Upon opening winmail.dat with a text viewer you can clearly make out a line that contains the full path to the .pst location on the sender's hard drive. Since this is located by default in the users profile directory, you can see the sender's NT account name as well as the domain name. The attachment of winmail.dat in Outlook RTF emails is documented in MS KB articles. They detail how to prevent the attachment of winmail.dat (configure the removal at the Exchange Server level, or don't use RTF formatting in your Outlook client). However they do not document what is contained in winmail.dat. Upon contacting secure@microsoft about this (4 months ago) I was informed a KB article detailing the contents of winmail.dat would be forthcoming (I cannot yet locate anything on their site). This behaviour was seen in Outlook 2000. I have not tested previous versions of Outlook, but judging by the KB articles, previous versions of Outlook have the exact same behaviour in regards to winmail.dat as Outlook 2000. As a side note it would be an interesting excercise to see if Outlook is susceptible to a message with a malformed winmail.dat attached. One could theoretically use winmail.dat to hit on holes in either Outlook itself, or the Outlook RTF engine (Outlook does not use the same RTF engine as Wordpad). So much for security when using Outlook!

Thanks for all the info, Tommy. But ... I still need to know if there is a way to modify the registry to get the mail format so that a user can change it. Our image has already been modified to lock the mail format option, I just need to unlock it.