Read this shortly ago at TheReg.
I"ve always believed that if the US Government were ever to get really serious about Internet security, the top players in Microsoft"s management hierarchy would find themselves handcuffed, blindfolded, led onto a tarmac within some obscure Air Force base, and shot.
Witness if you will Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, the two most efficient virus propagation utilities ever devised by human intellectual failure.
You can decline to send HTML messages, as any decent Netizen does; but you can"t decline to receive them. No, that would be downright hostile to the spam establishment, and Microsoft knows better than tangle with one of the few industries which dwarfs it.
However, some of us now have a nifty tool called NoHTML to disable HTML displays in Outlook, thanks to Russ Cooper of NTBugtraq. In Outlook 2000, NoHTML supposedly converts HTML to RTF. In Outlook 2002, it converts HTML to plain text. Pretty neat.
In NT, 2K or XP, just install the file (a DLL) in: Documents and Settings(user)Application DataMicrosoftAddins. Finish the installation as described below, re-boot, and all should be well.
If you"re running 9x, you might try installing it in: WindowsApplication DataMicrosoftAddInsWindowsLocal and/or in SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftOutlook.
Finish the installation thus: within Outlook, go to Tools, Options, Other, Advanced Options, COM Add-ins, Add. Find NoHTML.dll and select it. Re-boot.