Is there a way to turn off the ">" quotingcharacters in an email reply?

[Rescuedog]

I just set up Entourage 2008 to use with my .mac email account. I am trying to figure out how to keep my reply emails from including the ">", ">>", etc. characters in the existing text. I already unchecked "Use quoting characters when forwarding" in Preferences -->Mail & News Preferences-->Reply & Forward, but can't turn off the quoting characters for replies. Also, for what it's worth, I disabled quote levels in Mac Mail although I doubt it matters. Any ideas?

I know that I can strip the quote characters from an individual reply by clicking Edit-->AutoText Clean Up-->Remove Quoting but I was hoping there was a way to set my preferences in advance just as we can do for forwarded messages.

For me, this is basically a cosmetic issue but I am used to the Outlook format where quoting characters are an option that can be disabled (they can be disabled in Mac Mail as well). I think the quoting characters make the email trail more difficult to read, especially in a printed copy.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Barry Wainwright]

I just set up Entourage 2008 to use with my .mac email account. I am trying
to figure out how to keep my reply emails from including the ">", ">>", etc.
characters in the existing text. I already unchecked "Use quoting characters
when forwarding" in Preferences -->Mail & News Preferences-->Reply & Forward,

but can't turn off the quoting characters for replies. Also, for what it's
worth, I disabled quote levels in Mac Mail although I doubt it matters. Any
ideas?

I know that I can strip the quote characters from an individual reply by
clicking Edit-->AutoText Clean Up-->Remove Quoting but I was hoping there was

a way to set my preferences in advance just as we can do for forwarded
messages.

For me, this is basically a cosmetic issue but I am used to the Outlook
format where quoting characters are an option that can be disabled (they can
be disabled in Mac Mail as well). I think the quoting characters make the
email trail more difficult to read, especially in a printed copy.

Thanks in advance!

The quote character will only show up when you are replying in plain text
format. In such messages some way of indicating quoted text is pretty vital,
since you can't use paragraph indentation.

If you really, really need to use indentation as a quotation indicator, you
will have to use HTML mail (and I can't believe I just recommended someone
use HTML as their default!).

 

[Rescuedog]

Success! Thank you Barry.

For anyone else that cares about this issue, I should note that HTML was already my default format, but I also had checked "Reply to messages in the format in which they were sent" under the "Reply & Forward" window in Mail & News Preferences. So if I received an email in plain text format, my reply was also in plain text and the quoting characters appeared. Once I unchecked that option, the issue went away.

 

[Diane Ross]

For me, this is basically a cosmetic issue but I am used to the Outlook format
where quoting characters are an option that can be disabled (they can be
disabled in Mac Mail as well). I think the quoting characters make the email
trail more difficult to read, especially in a printed copy.

You must remember that most emails are not read in the printed version.