How to read your Slashdot emails in Outlook 2007

Overview

Somewhere between Outlook XP and Outlook 2007, Microsoft changed something and now Slashdot daily emails are often truncated, almost uniformly right in the middle of the most interesting story.

I can't live without my daily Slashdot, so I spent considerable time searching for a solution on the internet, but found none. I chalk this up to the fact that I am the only Slashdot reader using Outlook rather than PINE.

I got so desperate that I even opened a $100 paid support incident with Microsoft in hopes that they could help me. After about 20 emails back and forth over the course of several months, the helpful MS people acknowledged the bug and promised a fix someday. That was almost 2 years ago. At least I turned one MS person on to Slashdot in the process, so god's work was done.

Finally I tried a paid question on JustAsk, but still no joy.

Becoming more desperate and increasingly isolated and ignorant, I set out to solve the problem myself.

Here is the solution I came up with.

The Solution

  1. In Outlook, click on your Inbox folder so your emails are shown on the screen.
  2. Chose the menu item "Tools->Macros->Visual Basic Editor".
  3. Cut and paste the following code into the main editor area...

    	Sub FixSlashdot(Item As Outlook.MailItem)
		Item.BodyFormat = olFormatHTML
		Item.HTMLBody = Replace(Item.HTMLBody, "FONT SIZE=2" , "FONT face=courier SIZE=2" )
		Item.Save
	End Sub

  4. Close the Visual Basic window.
  5. Choose the menu item "Tools->Rules and Alerts..."
  6. "New Rule...", "Check messages when they arrive", "Next>"
  7. Check "with specific words in the sender's address"
  8. Click on the words "specific words" in the lower window and enter "slashdot@slashdot.org" then "add" then "ok"
  9. Click "Next>" then check "Run a script".
  10. Click on the words "a script" in the lower window and then select the FixSlashdot script we created above and click OK.
  11. Click finish followed by OK.
  12. You're done! You can even do "run rules now" to fix any amputated slashdot emails already sitting in your Inbox.

Now Outlook will automatically run the FixSlashdot script on each slashdot email the instant it arrives in your inbox. Basically all the script does is to tell Outlook to display the email as HTML rather than plaintext. Apparently the Outlook HTML rendering engine is more forgiving than the plaintext one, although Slashdot emails just don't look right unless they are in a fixed point font. Still, better than nothing.

Questions

If you have any questions or suggestions, you can reach me at...

support email address image

Updates

8/27/08 - Initial Upload.
8/31/08 - Added "Item.Save" at the end of the macro.
9/22/08 - Added the line to change the font to courier because, well, there is just something wrong about reading Slashdot in a kerned font.
11/17/08 - Fixed the formatting of the code so it is easier to cut and paste. Removed the "item.save" from the code because it is unnecessary.
11/24/08 - Added the Item.Save back in because it really is necessary. Sorry.

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