How can I enable internet-style quoting in Outlook Web Access? I have found several guides on how to enable it in Outlook but not a single one on Outlook Web Access. We are running version 8.1.
I cannot access the server using Exchange/IMAP externally. This is providing significant problems for me now since I have to spend a lot of time editing long e-mails before sending replies.
No, you cannot do email quoting in OWA. That being said, you can use Firefox with the It's All Text! add-on to open the text in a text editor and then add the quoting prefix there. From Fix Outlook Quoting Style:
In OWA, choose to reply to a message. Horribly quoted message text appears.
Use It’s All Text or some other similar tool to open message text in a reasonably smart editor.
Filter entire message text through this script. E.g. in Vim type
:%!path-to-script.rb, after making the script executable of course.Replace original mesage text with output of filter. If using It’s All Text, just type
:wq.Presto! Correctly quoted message. You might have to move your sig, though.
That’s how to use it, now here’s the script:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby # Fix outlook quoting. Inspired by perl original by Kevin D. Clark. # This program is meant to be used as a text filter. It reads a plaintext # outlook-formatted email and fixes the quoting to the "internet style", # so that:: # # -----Original Message----- # [from-header]: Blah blah # [timestamp-header]: day month etc # [...] # # message text # # or:: # # ___________________________ # [from-header]: Blah blah # [timestamp-header]: day month etc # [...] # # message text # # becomes:: # # On day month etc, Blah blah wrote: # > message text # # It's not meant to alter the contents of other peoples' messages, just to # filter the topmost message so that when you start replying, you get a nice # basis to start from. require 'date' require 'pp'message = ARGF.read
split into two parts at the first reply delimiter
match group so leaves the delim in the array,
this gets stripped away in the FieldRegex if's else clause
msgparts = message.split(/(---[\w\s]+---|______*)/)
first bit is what we've written so far
mymsg = msgparts.slice!(0)
rest is the quoted message
theirmsg = msgparts.join
this regex separates message header field name from field content
FieldRegex = /^\s(.+?):\s(.+)$/ from = nil date = nil theirbody = [] theirmsg.lines do |line| if !from || !date if FieldRegex =~ line parts = line.scan(FieldRegex) if !from from = parts.first.last elsif !date begin DateTime.parse(parts.first.last) date = parts.first.last rescue ArgumentError # not a parseable date.. let's just fail date = " " end end else # ignore non-field, this strips extra message delims for example end else theirbody << line.gsub(/^/, "> ").gsub(/> >/, ">>") end end
puts mymsg puts "On #{date}, #{from} wrote:\n" puts theirbody.join("")
Here's what I did --
Copy the part of the message you want to quote, scroll back up to your reply, and then click the "quote" button (under "message" toolbar), then paste it in.
The pasted message appears with a default style of a grey bar to the left; in order to insert replies inside the quoted text, just put the cursor there and hit enter or return a few times to break out of the quoting and put in your inline replies:
This is on Outlook Web App hosted on outlook.office365.com; not sure how to check which version, but I believe it's a current version as of this writing (Aug 2023). Hope that is helpful. Wish it was more built-in, but at least it is not too hard and doesn't require any additional software or plugins.
