Solved: Outlook Displays Messages in Plain Text
Written By Aaruni Arora 
Updated On September 28, 2026 Written By Aaruni Arora Updated On September 28, 2026 Quick Fix: Check Outlook's Read all standard mail in plain text setting. If it is enabled, Outlook removes HTML formatting from standard messages when displaying them. If the setting is already disabled, determine whether the issue affects every email or only specific messages before troubleshooting further.
Is your Outlook displaying messages as plain text instead of the usual HTML formatting? It can happen if your Outlook is specifically configured to read emails as plaint text or if the message is being displayed in a format different than what you’ve configured. This guide explains why this happens and provides effective solutions for New Outlook and classic Outlook.
The following snippet is an example of this error.
There can be various reasons why Outlook displays your messages as plain text. The cause usually depends on what exactly you’re experiencing.
| What you're experiencing | Why is it happening |
|---|---|
| Majority of emails appear as plain text | Outlook may be configured to read standard mail in plain text |
| Only one or a few emails are displayed as plain text | The sender might have sent them as plain text |
| New emails are being composed as plain text | Outlook's compose settings might be set to Plain Text |
| Images and formatting are not showing up in emails | It may be happening because messages are being displayed in plain text instead of HTML |
| Plain-text display occurs along with other Outlook problems like freezing or crashing | A damaged or legacy Outlook data file may require investigation |
For the updates to work, you might have to restart Outlook a couple of times.
It is to be noted that the emails that were received during the period in which the problem persisted are going to be in the plain text format but the emails out of this period are going to be displayed in the HTML format. As ANSI format is no longer used by the newer Outlook versions, it becomes important to convert to Unicode format which allows the user to have larger PST files.
If Outlook displays messages in plain text rather than the HTML format, the issue might be with the settings configured in the Outlook account. Follow the steps below to check this:
After doing this, check if Outlook is displaying messages in HTML again or if the issue still persists.
Not necessarily. Changing the configured settings only manages the formats of the emails you send from your account, not the format of emails you receive.
The steps to change the configured settings in New Outlook are different from Classic Outlook because the interface is different. First, check if Outlook is configured to display email messages as plain text and if the problem occurs with only one email, check if the problem is related to Outlook as a whole or is it specific to that email itself.
If HTML emails display correctly in other email messages but not for a single email, the problem may be with the sender's message format rather than your Outlook application.
If other emails display their text in HTML but one or a few emails appear as plain text, the issue may be specific to that email only. There’s a chance the email might have been sent as plain text by the sender.
Plain-text email lack the formatting elements used for HTML format:
To verify if the problem is Outlook specific, open and check multiple emails from different senders.
When Outlook displays messages in plain text, first try the simplest solution and check if Outlook is configured to read standard mail in plain text. If only certain messages are affected, check if they’re sent as plain text only or not. If the problem still persists even though the Outlook settings are correct, check if the Outlook data file is corrupt. If that does come up as the reason, try to repair it with a dedicated PST Repair tool.
For confirmed PST corruption, a dedicated PST repair tool such as Kernel for Outlook PST Repair can help repair the damaged data and recover mailbox items.
A: HTML emails often contain formatting, hyperlinks, images, and other visual elements whereas plain-text emails only consist of unformatted text. Thus, if Outlook displays an HTML message as plain text, you may notice that: