Microsoft Outlook view email as text only(Outlook XP and 2003) - 2003-11-14 This tip is great to increase the security and speed of Microsoft Outlook.  By default Outlook will render HTML contained in an email.  While this allows for very nice looking emails it introduces quite a few problems.  The first problem is security.  By rendering HTML it can also execute malicious scripts.  Vulnerabilities that affect Internet Explorer can also affect Outlook through HTML emails.  The second problem is that many of the spam emails sent out take forever to load because of the numerous images it needs to render the HTML.  Here is the solution for you:

1)  Open the registry editor(regedit.exe)

2)  Traverse the registry till you reach the following key:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

3)  Add(or edit) a new DWORD value named ReadAsPlain.

4)  Set the value of the above DWORD to 1.

Thanks to TheScreensavers for this great tip.