OLEXP: How to View the HTML Source for Outlook Express Messages

This article describes how to view, but not edit, the HTML source code of messages created using Outlook Express.

To view the HTML source code of messages created or received by Outlook Express, follow these steps:

1. Click the message whose source code you want to view.
2. Press CTRL+F2. This opens Notepad with the HTML portion of the message displayed. The header information is not displayed.

Note that the file that appears in Notepad is a temporary file; it does not save any changes to the message in Outlook Express. To see the entire message source code (including the headers), follow these steps:

1. Click the message whose source code you want to view, and then click Properties on the File menu.
2. On the Details tab, click Message Source.

You can resize or maximize the window to see more of the information. The content you see is the exact information sent by the originator and is viewable only in the code page in which it was created.

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set defines a mapping of the letters, numerals, and specified punctuation and control characters to the numbers from zero to 127. The term "code page" is used to refer to extensions of the ASCII character set that also map specified symbols to the numbers from 128 through 255.