Force Exchange 2007 to send a plain text format by email and domain

Microsoft Exchange uses the rich text format to send all outgoing mail by default. In some cases, you may be forced to use plain text to send mail to some recipients who have trouble reading rich text formatting. A common problem that an administrator may experience is that some mail recipients receive the dreaded winmail.dat file attachment from users within their Exchange organization.

This article will provide step-by-step instructions to force an Exchange 2007 server to send outbound mail by recipient and by email domain.

Force Exchange 2007 to send a plain text at the domain level

This method requires you to create a new remote domain entry and use shell commands to configure the format that Exchange will use when sending outbound mail only to this domain.

Create the remote domain:

1. Open the Exchange Management Console. In the “Organization Settings” container, click “Hub Transport.”

2. Select the “Remote domains” tab and on the right under the action panel click the “New remote domain” link.

3. Give the connector a name and enter the domain name to which you would like to send the plan text. for example domain.com. Click new and then finish.

4. Open the properties of the newly created deleted domain and click the “original message format sent as journal report attachment” tab.

5. Under “Swap Rich Text Formatting,” select the “Never Use” bullet.

At this point, I would assume that all outgoing mail to this remote domain will be forced to be sent in plain text format, but we need to run some shell commands on the remote domain object before this happens.

Apply shell commands to the remote domain:

1. Open the shell and type “Get-RemoteDomain -Identity:domain.com | fl”, where domain.com is the name of the remote domain object (not the actual remote domain name).

Here you will notice that under “Content Type” the format is set to “MimeHTMLText”. To force the plain text, we want to set it to MimeText so that no HTML is used.

2. At a shell prompt, type “Set-RemoteDomain -Identity:domain.com -ContentType:MimeText” again, where doman.com is the name of the remote domain. Typing the Get-RemoteDomain command will verify that the changes have been made and set the “Content-Type” to MimeText.

Once these changes are completed successfully, the Exchange server will force the format as plain text, regardless of what is configured in the end users’ Outlook client for any recipient in the email domain “domain. com” set to the “remote domain” object.

Force Exchange 2007 to send plain text at the recipient level

There might be a case where you need to send mail to 1 recipient on an email domain as plain text only. To do this, you need to create a contact item for this user and apply some shell commands to it.

1. Open the “Exchange Management Console”, select the “Recipient Settings” container, and then select the “Mail Contact” container.

2. Create a new contact for the remote recipient you were exchanging with for the plain text format.

3. Open the properties of the newly created contact. On the General tab, under “Use MAPI Rich Text Format”, select “Never”.

Now we need to apply the following shell commands to the newly created contact object to force the plain text format.

1. At a shell prompt, type “Get-MailContact -Identity “contact name” |fl” where “contact name” is the display name of the newly created contact object. You will see that the “Message Format” is Mime and the “Message Body” format is TextAndHtml. We need to change both to Text to force the use of plain text formatting.

2. To change this, we need to type the following 3 shell commands after each other:

Set-MailContact -Identity “contact name” -MessageBodyFormat:Text

Set-MailContact -Identity “contact name” -MessageFormat:Text

Set-MailContact -Identity “contact name” -UsePreferMessageFormat:$true

Once this is done, you will see that when typing Get-MailContact, both “Message To” and “Message Body” will be set to text.

Now all mail sent through your Exchange server to the recipient contact you created will be set to plain text and will not affect any other recipients on the same domain.

Running and maintaining an Exchange server environment can be overwhelming. If you’d rather not have the stress of taking care of your own Exchange organization, you can choose a hosted Exchange server solution instead.