A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Update: A hotfix has been released for the problem of emails printing in tiny font: 
http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2007/03/18/689883.aspx

HOTFIX:  The email message header does not print when you try to print an email message by using either Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Outlook Express
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/931657

UPDATE:  THANKS TO THE TRUST AND GOOD FAITH OF SEVERAL READERS OF THIS BLOG, AND MY WEB SITE, WE HAVE RECEIVED SAMPLE EMAILS THAT CAUSE THE PRINTING PROBLEMS.   THE IE TEAM WERE ABLE TO REPRODUCE THE PROBLEM USING THOSE EMAILS.  A FIX IS IN THE WORKS AND WILL BE RELEASED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.  I WILL BLOG ABOUT THIS AS SOON AS IT IS AVAILABLE. 

We need your help.

There are reports that IE7 is causing problems when printing emails from Outlook or Outlook Express such as:

  • OE6 emails print without headers
  • Messages appearing in tiny font at the top left of page

Unfortunately we cannot reproduce the problem.  If we can't make it happen on our computers, then we can't work out what's wrong, and we can't tell you how to fix it.

So, this is what we need from you.

If, for example, you have an Outlook email that loses its headers when printed please save the email as a .msg file and send it to me.  Similarly, if you have an Outlook Express email that prints with very tiny fonts, save the email as an .eml file and send it to me.

I understand that by doing this I am asking you to send to me stuff that you may feel is personal and private, but all I can do is ask you to trust that I, and the IE team, will not abuse your good faith, and hope that you have an email available, such as spam or something from a mailing list, that you feel more comfortable sending to me.

When you send the emails to me please tell me:

1.  What version of IE you are running.

2.  What type of printer you have (exact model and make).

3.  Tell me if you have installed the latest printer drivers.

4.  Have you tried adjusting your print margins, which has been known to help the problem.

5.  Please tell us exactly what problem you are having.  That is, don't say "this won't print properly".  We need to know exactly what you mean by "won't print properly".

PLEASE CLICK ON THE WWW.IE-VISTA.COM ADVERTISEMENT TO LEFT OF SCREEN, THEN CLICK ON THE "CONTACT SANDI" LINK TO AUTO-GENERATE AN EMAIL THAT YOU CAN USE TO SEND THE EMAILS.

Published Sat, Dec 9 2006 10:39 by sandi
Filed under:

Comments

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Wednesday, December 13, 2006 1:51 PM by HiltonT

Hi Sandy,

Who wants these emails?  I have clients suffering from these issues and who are happy to send emails to Microsoft to get this resolved.

Sandi says @hilton: I'm collecting them. There's a 'contact sandi' link at www.ie-vista.com which you can use.


Thanks!

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Wednesday, December 13, 2006 4:53 PM by HiltonT

Hi Sandi,

Do you know where?  There seems to be only an "please tell us what the issue is" plea for more information without any URL nor email address of where to send this information.  (In the Breaking News section.)

Having this information easily accessible would likely aid in getting the problem resolved!

Sandi says: @hilton:

Hilton - Every page on www.ie-vista.com has a Contact Sandi link in oversize font. 

Look to the left of screen on every page at www.ie-vista.com and you will see it - (third down under the MVP logo)  Click on that link. It will open an email.  I don't like to publish my email address here because the spambots pick it up too quickly.  The ie-vista contact link, on the other hand, is encoded and unreadable by spambots.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Thursday, January 04, 2007 1:26 PM by Anne Goulart

Sandi;

It's great that you want this information however, I have users nationwide that are having this issue and when they forward the email to me the problem doesn't happen for me.  I've had them scan the bad printing and send the thing as an attachment so I can see that it really is happening.

So, me sending you the offending email isn't going to let you see the problem.  I would hazard to guess that the same is true if any of my users were to do the same.

Anne Goulart

Duluth, GA

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Friday, January 05, 2007 2:13 PM by sandi

Hi Anne,

Forwarding an email before printing is a known workaround for this problem.  If you ask the user to send the email to you as an attachment, and you then open that attachment and print, you may be able to reproduce the problem.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Friday, January 05, 2007 5:58 PM by dhubbell

Ok, let me get this straight.  Some blogging site is offering help with a Microsoft problem?  The so called Microsoft Tech is willing to help here, but not on a Microsoft url?

This link here:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/showpost.aspx?postid=1069762&siteid=1&PageID=1

Is where I thought there would be answers, but I guess Microsoft wishes to support users through a blog.

Makes perfect sense to me, where do I send all of my confidential email?

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Saturday, January 06, 2007 12:02 AM by sandi

Dhubbell,

"Some blogging site"?  "so called Microsoft Tech"?  You don't know me too well, do you.  

For your information, I am not "Microsoft Tech", I am a Microsoft MVP (go to mvp.support.microsoft.com to learn what that is).

You will find a 'contact Sandi' link at www.ie-vista.com

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Saturday, January 06, 2007 9:39 AM by Mike

Any Idea on when this will be released as yet?  even a rough time frame would be good as I've a few customer who wish to roll back to IE6 because of this issue.  Im afraid If I let them do this they wont agree to going back up to IE7 for a long time!!!! will it be something to look out for on patch tuesday for example?

Many thanks for your help!!

# If it was open source, it'd be fixed by now

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 10:37 PM by Adam Nielsen

Our department just got a whole bunch of new PCs and now we're experiencing this problem too - I have to say, I'm quite surprised that it has taken Microsoft this long given that so many people were affected.

If it was Linux someone would've gone in and written their own fix long ago... (or at the very least we'd be kept up to date on progress.)  There really is something to be said for open source - I hate having to rely on the whim of someone else to fix my problems.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Thursday, January 18, 2007 11:06 PM by John

Hi Sandi, any news about a fix? The problem is driving us mad - as I'm sure it is for lots of other people out there! Many thanks.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Friday, January 19, 2007 3:17 AM by sandi

They know the cause, but the fix affects not only printing emails but everything else that works via IE for printing, therefore regression testing is a kicker. I'll be emailing the team to try and find out what's happening and when.  As soon as I have info I can share, I will.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Saturday, January 20, 2007 7:17 PM by Cheryl

A friend of mine has just downloaded the IE7 and is experiencing problems printing from the web.  He has an HP Photosmart 8450.  His printing is very small and nothing we tried has changed it back to normal.  He says his e-mail is printing fine and documents from word print fine, but nothing from the internet is printing correctly.  Please help.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Wednesday, January 24, 2007 1:11 PM by Justin

Any update on when this patch will be released. This has been an issue WAY to long, and needs to be resolved NOW!

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Wednesday, January 24, 2007 5:05 PM by sandi

Hi Justin,

Believe me, the team are well aware of the problem and the need to get it fixed as soon as possible (that happens when you're being browbeaten by somebody like me) Smile

As I said in an earlier comment, regression testing is a kicker, and I'd prefer that they make very sure that something else doesn't get broken when we fix this issue.

I still can't work out why I was not able, and still am unable, to reproduce the problem on my own networks and system - we're talking 30+ PCs, all running IE7, OE and OL using all three mail formats and printers from 4 different vendors.  Thankfully the gang on the IE team are way smarter than me and were able to reproduce and diagnose the problem using the emails that readers sent to me direct.

Watch this space.. the team are VERY aware of the pain this issue is causing.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Wednesday, January 31, 2007 3:14 PM by Joe

Not seeing anything formal at Microsoft about this issue nor any type of fix.  Do you have any update on progress now that another week has passed?  Thanks.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Thursday, February 01, 2007 3:21 PM by Rick

Thanks for the update; hopefully, a solution is in the works. My situation is slightly different; I recently upgraded to IE 7 from IE 6 and utilize OE 6; I use an HP Officejet 7410 & Windows XP; the header prints out fine when I use the default 'legal size' paper setting; it's only when I opt to print on 'letter size' that the header fails to print.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Monday, February 05, 2007 10:48 AM by Graham

Thank heaven I've found someone who knows what is going on! MS still seem to be keeping very quiet and we've been struggling with this for a while. Any further news of the fix would be greatly appreciated. For info, have identified problem to combination of IE7, Outlook 2003 and messages in html, although latter seems also to depend on what was used to create/edit them. The workround of changing paper size also seems to help - it's never a problem in landscape!

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Friday, February 09, 2007 9:06 AM by Neil

This is affecting a lot of our clients.  I'm surprised it slipped through testing.  I suppose another solution might be to uninstall IE7 and use Firefox instead.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Monday, February 12, 2007 2:54 AM by ingo

this issue is now discussed over 2 month. is there any fix to that issue ? no! why ? the problem just lies within the bullshit stylesheets office applications tend to create when working with html in microsoft products. no wonder, if at microsoft nobody did care about standards like html 4.01, css 1.0, 2.0 and more. now they suppose to do so - and what happens from that ? the bullshit stylesheets does not work anymore when printing with IE7. this is a self made problem which comes from always ignoring the standard. now they want to be more compatible with the standard. this will be a neverending story i believe.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Monday, February 12, 2007 4:49 AM by sandi

Ingo,

I have only one word in response to your comment:

NONSENSE!!

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Monday, February 12, 2007 11:32 AM by JoannaKM

I got this link from the forum on microsoft.com. Although some work-arounds didn't work for me, I have been able to have consistent success with the following:

1 - Open the html message, right-click in the e-mail body and "Select All" text, then go to File, Print and choose "Selection" under Page Range. Magically, headers print.

2 - A more set work-around. Set your default Memo Style to A4 paper and then set your printer to print the document "Fit to Paper" and choose "Letter". That way, the e-mail is formatted to print to A4, but the printer "shrinks" it to fit on Letter-size.

I hope this helps someone out there until there is an official fix. I have cursed up a storm at work and am upset about having to waste so much paper trying all kinds of tricks.

Joanna

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Wednesday, February 21, 2007 5:17 AM by Andrew

Any update on this, even an estimated date for a fix? At the minute weve got nothing and it is getting a little irritating.

Thanks

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Wednesday, February 21, 2007 5:46 AM by sandi

Hi Andrew,

Unfortunately I don't have a date that I can commit to publicly, although I do have an indication of when it may be.  Keep watching this space. The minute I have something I can share, I'll do so.

BTW, if your problem is with headers and footers missing, then a hotfix is already out.  It is the 'shrink' problem that we are waiting for a fix on.

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Thursday, February 22, 2007 3:58 AM by Andrew Hastings

Thanks Sandi, weve got both problems really but the more annoying one is the tiny text problem! Where's the fix for the headers, is there a KB article?

Thanks

# re: A call for help - can you help us work out why some people have trouble printing emails after installing IE7?

Thursday, February 22, 2007 3:59 AM by Andrew Hastings

Sorry, just seen the HOTFIX at the top of the page, please ignore my previous comment!

Thanks and good work for bringing this all to MS's attention!