How To Empower Yourself and Never Be Duped Again
Read All Outlook Email In Text Only

There is an existential — but not immutable — fact about the Internet and its technologies, like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and the whole alphabet soup of web developers' deliria.  Obfuscation is both an art and science to the crooks who craft the bogus emails discussed earlier, and their concomitant websites and webpages.  These developers' obfuscation tricks can only be pulled off, as was the case with that Old Wizard, My Pretties,  if the digital mark never pulls back the digital grifter's curtain.  When you read your email in text only, which is a setting in Outlook, the obfuscation tricks are thwarted, and the true and complete path of any hyperlinks within the body of the email are revealed.  Thus, you have the road map for your trip along the Information Superhighway.  For you must first know where you are going before you can decide if you really want to go there.

Let's first look at how an email is displayed by default in Outlook.  Similar to the web based email platforms, Outlook displays individual messages as a web page.  Below is an email that I typically receive from the technology distributor, Ingram Micro.

If we strip away all the dancing bears of the HTML used to craft the email message, we can clearly see the complete path of any and all hyperlinks contained within the body of the message.

To set read all Outlook email in Text Only, we first need to click File from the Main Menu in Outlook.  From the File menu, we scroll down and select Options.

From the Outlook Options menu, Click Trust Center.  The Click the Trust Center Settings button.

When the Trust Center Settings opens, click Email Security.  By checking both boxes under Read as Plain Text, your Outlook email will open in text only by default.

If you aren't really sure about this Text Only email idea, you can at least control the automatic downloading of picture files, which certainly can be malware laden.  Do this to ensure the greatest security when opening an email.

Once you have evaluated the email that arrived in your Inbox as a HTML webpage is from a legitimate sender and the email has no hyperlinks that might lead to illegitimate destinations, then you can convert that single email back to HTML.  Simply mouse over the light blue bar that says We converted this message to plain text.

When we display the email as HTML, the email reformats to its original appearance.

I understand that when in the eye of the hurricane that can be any business that ends in the letter "Y", these extra steps when reading email seem like way too much of a bother.  I would counter by saying that these extra seconds to a couple of minutes taken to clearly understand the nature of any email message could well save you days of wasted down time.

And then you tell that Old Devil FUD, Ciao,Babe.