How to Clean Up a Stat to Reuse
I've been thinking of doing this tutorial for some time. Someone out there may have a better way of doing this, and if you do, I'd love to hear from you! But this is the way I've come up with doing it. It's a little intimidating at first because you have to go into the coding of the email. If you're not used to looking at it, or understand what it means, it looks like garbley-gook! (I don't know if that's a real word....but my parents taught it to me so it must be real!) But if you make a mistake, just close the email out without saving the changes and try again. Once you get the hang of it, it only takes about two seconds to clean up an email.
Have you ever had someone send you and email that you wanted to reply to, but when you hit the "Reply" button, Outlook Express puts in this garbage:
Not only does it put in this garbage, it also puts that ugly black line down the left side of the message. There's a really easy way to get rid of that mess and have a beautiful reply.
1) See at the bottom where the source code tab is? That's where you go to find the OE coding and delete it.
2) Go ahead and click on the source tab on this email. Take a look at the coding. Kinda scary, huh? But it's not really. It's just a bunch of code that puts all that beautiful stuff on the page. Don't forget to hit "Edit" to come back to this portion of the email when you're done./
3) This is the part we want to take out. This is the stuff OE puts in that makes the reply so ugly. Take an old email out of your inbox, open it. Hit the reply button and locate the source tab on the bottom. Take a look at the coding and see if you can find this portion:
I've had to minimize this quite a bit and it's still a fairly big graphic so I hope you all can read it. If not, let me know and I will make a better image, zip it and send it to you. The thing you want to keep is the body background and the sound. If you accidentally delete them, just close up the email, select NO when it asks if you wish to save the changes, and start over. Right beneath it you will see where I've highlighted the source starting with the <div>. Scroll down until you find where the actual message starts. You want to leave that bit of coding in right before the message. The stuff in between can be deleted. Once you do that, go back to Edit and you will see that the sender's message is still there. If you want to leave it there, just tab it down a bit and start your message above it.
This takes a little playing around with but once you master it, you will love the results. Sometimes you might find the sound coding in that block of stuff. If it's there, just highlight around it and leave it in. Some stats have more extensive coding than others but this block of garbage will be located somewhere within the body of the email.
Give this a try and see if it works for you!