This is rather strange. Our incoming emails (using Outlook 2003) have always displayed as 10pt Arial and we like that. The other day, however, Outlook started rendering the font on all incoming emails as 12pt Times New Roman. I checked the Mail Format tab under Tools/Options and everything is set to display with 10pt Arial.

Totally lost as to why such a change would just happen out of the blue, and why something is overriding our settings in Outlook, we rebooted, which didn't help. Then I searched the Internet looking for clues and the only thing I could find was a page where someone said that Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook have a dubious and often hard to understand relationship.

I then went into Internet Explorer/Tools/Internet Options/Fonts and changed the Web Page font to Arial. Guess what? It changed the incoming emails to Arial, but now they are rendered at 14 - 16 pts. This is huge.

So, my questions are:

1.) Is there a way to take the power away from IE and let me set fonts in Outlook in the Tools/Options/Mail Format tab?

2.) What might have caused this abrupt, and unwelcome, change?

3.) If IE must take control of my incoming mail font settings, then can I make the font smaller? Right now the 14- 16 pt is just huge. I didn't see any place to select the size other than using View/Text Size. But this doesn't carry over to the emails and my webpage fonts look okay.

Any help would save my sanity.

Best regards,

Tad