The other day, a customer emailed me and asked a question about the attachments in her email. She was seeing the attachments embedded in the body of the email instead of in the Attachments area below the subject line. She wanted to know why that happened, and how she could get it fixed.

First, here’s what an embedded file looks like in an email:

Normally, the file shows up in the Attached field under the Subject line:

The reason for the change in behavior is that your email formatting has been changed from HTML to Rich Text:

When the setting is Rich Text, all attachments are placed within the body of the email, and you can determine where they are placed by putting your cursor where you want the attachment to show up. If you want the attachments to show up in the Attached field, just change the setting to be HTML.

If you want to fix that for all emails, go to the Outlook Options by selecting File > Options, and make the following setting change: