What Hotmail option omits the “>” character on each line of a forwarded message?

Question

Whenever I forward Hotmail messages, the > character is added to the front of each line. I have searched for options to stop this but can find nothing, and it is really annoying. How can I change this?

> To: M—-@HOTMAIL.COM
> Subject: Your Chapters-Indigo Order,
> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 18:05:15 -0400
>
> Bonjour M—, ce message figure en français ci-dessous.
>
> Dea>r M——,
>
> Thank you for shopping with chapters.indigo.ca

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there isn't one fixed way to address this issue. Let me explain why.

All email clients and all email services (they may be the same but not necessarily) have their own "posting style". Read more here. This can even differ for the type of message being replied to or forwarded. Messages with text/plain mime types are treated differently that text/html mime types. For instance, mail clients tend to indent HTML messages but prepend > symbol to plain text messages.

Now, for your question- there is no way to control this behaviour through the web interface. If you are using the native Outlook client you can control this to some extent.

At the time of writing this answer, Hotmail.com has been converted to Outlook.com but there exists no option to influence the posting style in part due to the reasons described here.