How do I choose plain text in Hotmail?

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Summary: Plain text email is smaller, often easier to read, and more consistently displayed than rich text. Here's how to switch between the two in Hotmail.

Interestingly enough, the default for Hotmail appears to be plain text. But regardless, we'll look at where that option is hidden - and why in some cases it's not available at all.

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Where it's hidden is easy. When you compose a new message in HotMail, click on the Tools menu and you should see something like this:

Note the option to turn the rich text editor on. Click on that, and you'll see a new set of controls appear over the message body:

These are the tools that allow you to apply rich text formatting such as bold, italics, font changes and so on to you email. If you click on the Tools menu now, you'll see that it's changes:

Click on Rich-Text Editor OFF and you'll get a warning about losing all your formatting (plain text has no formatting), and the rich text toolbar will disappear, and any email you've composed will revert to plain text.

But there's a catch.

If you run FireFox (and possibly other browsers), you may see this when you click on the Tools menu:

You'll note that the "Rich-Text" option doesn't appear. You are apparently stuck with plain text as your only option.

Related:

• Ask Leo! - What's the difference between "plain text" and "HTML" email? - includes the equivalent instructions for Outlook Express users.

• Ask Leo! - Why doesn't my email format properly in Outlook?

• Ask Leo! - What's this backwards P all over my email?