I use Outlook Express 5 with Windows 95 on my home PC and am having problems reading files sent to me in html. The emails are being displayed as html code instead of either a plain text message or in a web page format. I recently installed Internet Explorer 5.5 (which includes Outlook Express 5) at home to see if this would fix the problem but it did not make any difference. The message appears beautifully as a web format in Microsoft Outlook which is the e-mail application I use at work.

As the problem doesn’t occur when receiving the email at work and only occurs when receiving it at home, we can assume that the problem isn’t with the email but something to do with your home setup. Let’s firstly narrow down your problem to either your computer or your ISP. Send yourself an HTML email. It doesn’t have to be too fancy, just with some bold type, different font sizes, etc… Once the email has been sent, go into your ‘Sent Items’ folder and view the email. If the email is displayed with HTML formatting, then the problem is more than likely with your ISP’s mail server somehow doing something to incoming HTML emails which makes them unreadable by Outlook Express. In this case, I suggest that you ask your ISP for advice. However, if the email is displayed in HTML code, then the problem is with your computer. This is probably, for some reason, because Outlook Express doesn’t recognise the HTML code and thus doesn’t convert it into a web page. Firstly have a look at the article ‘HTML Code May Be Printed Instead of a Web Page or Message’ at Microsoft Knowledge Base. This can be found at support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q175/3/22.ASP. Although this article relates to Outlook Express 4, it may still be relevant. If you have no joy with this, your best bet would probably be to speak to the IT people at your work place who designed the HTML email you are being sent.