Please Turn off Hotmail's Rich Text Formatting
Using Hotmail's Rich Text Formatting (more commonly called html mail) to send your email can be an annoyance to those receiving mail with text based email programs.  The person receiving the message does not see pretty fonts and bolding.  Instead he only sees that the message has an html attachment (which must be read separately by a browser) or he sees a bunch of extra characters, the html tags, that hide the true message.
 
Here's a tiny example from my mail. In order to say one word
Hi,
the mail contained the characters
<DIV><P><FONT face="Garamond, Times, Serif" size=4>Hi,</FONT></P></DIV>
which had to be read through to find the message.  To the sender it looked like one little word, to the recipient junk.  Come to think of it most spam or junk mail seems to come in the html-only form.
 
It is turned off in the same manner you turned it on. Go to the compose tab and select the Tools drop down list.
The line that says Rich-Text Editor OFF is not telling you the current status is off.
 
Click there to turn the Rich-Text Editor OFF!
Users of MSN Hotmail and Internet Explorer are often encouraged to use what Hotmail calls "Rich Text Formatting".

The Hotmail help file has a heading called "How do I make e-mail I send more colorful and fun?"  It then goes on to give the following instructions

If your Web browser is Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later for Windows, you can use MSN Hotmail's Rich Text Formatting (RTF). To turn on the Rich-Text editor, click the Tools button on the upper left of the message text area in the Compose page. Now you can use colorful fonts and formatting with numbers, bullets, and custom background colors. The Rich Text Formatting option also allows you to add emoticons (quick icons to express emotions) to your e-mail

What the help doesn't tell you is it really is just creating html attachments to be sent instead of text mail, full of html code, but which do show up in a pretty manner on most new email programs.

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