Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
Email programs will often automatically include the text of the original in a reply, and format it slightly differently. Some use blue bars.
The blue vertical lines on the left side of an email, how do you get rid of them? Sometimes you can delete them & sometimes when you try to, the whole email disappears. They are just annoying & tacky looking. We never use to see them & now they are just about on everything!
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The blue lines are your email program attempting to be helpful. Or, rather, the email program of whomever has sent you that message.
Most likely in reply to a message of yours.
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When you reply to a message many email programs have the option of including the original message in the reply, so that the recipient can see just what it was you were replying to. Here's an example of my replying to the original message:
As I said, this is an option in most mailers, and can normally be turned off so as not to quote the original at all. Some mailers will let you control what the quoting style should be, and some do not.
It's controlled by the email program of the person doing the replying.
Now, as to deleting it ... well, on the receiving end as you've seen it can be problematic. Sometimes the email program that created it will do so by using an HTML table, which is very easy to accidentally delete all at once. The silly work-around is to click within the quoted text and then delete pieces of it from within the table. Regardless, the blue line won't disappear until the entire table is gone anyway.
Yep, it's a bit of a mess, and I share your frustration. I do wish that mailers were a little more configurable and sane about how they create quoted replies.
There is one approach that is fairly universal, and universally easy to deal with.
Use plain text.
The blue line style is typically the result of a rich text or HTML formatted email reply. If, instead, the reply is in plain text, it'll look more like this:
Leo
> -- Question --
> I searched on your site first & there was two answers that came up &
> they did not pertain to what I want to know so I am asking you. I have
...
Since it is just plain text, you can edit it to your hearts desire. No, it's not as pretty as the original, but it is under your control.
But once again, this is all a side effect of replying, and it's all under the control of the email program used by the person doing the replying.
Article C3662 - February 27, 2009 « »
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
May 28, 2010 11:02 AM
voyellaahhhhh..........its working....thank u so much....
February 8, 2011 3:31 PM
Out of all of these, the only one that worked was by Joe Read at March 3, 2009 9:01 AM. Thank you.
February 15, 2011 1:24 PM
Found another solution, on Martha's Web, that seems to work for me in Outlook 2003 using Word as the editor:
Click "Forward" to create an editable version of the e-mail.
Hover your mouse near the top of the leftmost blue line so that the table symbol appears.
Click on the table symbol - this will highlight all content in the table.
On the menu click Table | Convert | Table to Text...
In the popup window, make sure "Paragraph marks" and "Convert nested tables" are checked - these are the defaults on mine.
Click OK.
All other header stuff, and any little pieces of blue lines can now be deleted as you would any text.
Now having said that, the "Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Del, Ctrl+V" solution that others have posted here also works for me and is even easier. :-)
Thanks, everyone, for the solutions.
July 4, 2011 6:21 PM
Copying and pasting into a new email appears to work except pictures are lost.
How do you get rid of blue lines without losing the pictures in Outlook 2003?
06-Jul-2011
July 9, 2011 12:49 PM
Blue lines are marking original quotes from forwarding or replying to messages.
They are really, in Outlook anyway, a
Border around text with only the left side of the border defined. Multiple ones are nested within each other and appear to be difficult to remove ... But Noooo
Assuming you are using Word as your Outlook editor (the default!!), you can remove them simply by selecting the portion of text highlighted by the blue line, Select FORMAT ==>BORDERS AND SHADING, and select NONE.
Note: You must select all of the text highlighted to make it work.
If there are multiple nested lines, select the leftmost one first, and work your way to the right.