Why all these dots instead of the spaces that were there & ¶ marks when I Reply to or Forward an email in my new Outlook in Office 2019 Pro+?

Anonymous
2025-05-09T01:51:07+00:00

This is crazy and surely there's an easy Settings fix. I've been using Outlook on my Windows PC since the early '90s. Just finally upgraded to Outlook in Office 2019 Pro+ from Outlook 2016. What the heck is Outlook doing by putting dots instead of all the spaces on emails as I'm Replying to them? More importantly, how do I stop it from this madness?

Here's an example:

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For business

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-05-21T06:17:48+00:00

    Diane, you'd said that there might be a registry thing I could do to permanently get rid of the Formatting Symbols in my Outlook emails, (maybe even in Word and Excel docs too?) Can you help me do that, please?
    I'm pretty sure I can live without them, just as I have the last 50 years or so. ;-)
    I've only done registry edits a few times and I know not to be careless. If there's any commands that can just be entered into an Elevated Command Prompt box, that would be how I think it would be better to do it.
    I just did some of those a few months ago to trick Microsoft into letting me upgrade this PC from Windows 10 to 11. I had help doing it over on the Macrium Reflect disc imaging forum. I use that program and someone taught me how to trick the Microsoft system into doing it for a machine that it had determined didn't specifically meet their upgrade requirements. It works fine on 11.

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-05-21T05:42:23+00:00

    Diane, this is weird. If I send myself an email using my outlook.com email address from on my iPhone's Outlook for iOS, if I go to Reply or Forward it, it opens with those formatting marks all over it that I don't ever want to see and that no longer show up on other emails that I do the same with.

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-05-20T05:59:34+00:00

    Diane, seems like it's behaving now and remembering that I don't want to see the formatting marks junk. Thanks for your help.

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-05-16T03:11:04+00:00

    Let me make sure I've got this straight. Are those formatting marks supposed to stay off after I turn them off, until I turn them back on?

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-05-16T01:37:26+00:00

    Diane, since I haven't heard back from you recently I wanted to ask you, can you please help me through this?

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