While HTML offers some great safety features, you can play it safer yet with Plain Text format. Why? Because just as Plain Text is the simplest and least cumbersome format you can choose for sending a message, it also simplifies things with messages you receive. If you're willing to forgo the benefits of color, useful formatting, and other niceties, you could benefit from greater peace of mind. Plain Text offers you privacy, security, and the simplest possible text styles in a message (if that's what you happen to like).

If you opt for Plain Text as your initial "receive" format, there are a couple things you should keep in mind:

• When you reply to or forward a message that you've viewed this way, the format of the reply or forwarded message will be Plain Text, as well.
• This setting will not reduce the size of a received message, the way it does a sent or forwarded message. Here's why: Even though you don't view the message using HTML or RTF, Outlook stores this formatting information for you, in case you change your mind later.

To read the messages you receive in Plain Text format, you would select the Read all standard mail in plain text check box (in the E-mail Options dialog box). We'll show you how to do that in the practice session, next.