Mystery solved

Even after all these years dealing with Microsoft technologies, there are still wrinkles to learn. And more often than not, you can read "bug" where I've written "wrinkle."

A few days ago, shortly after the release of Weird and Wonderful, I changed my standard email sig to include a line directing people to the Beresford & Wallace website. As you'd expect, this worked fine when composing a new email message, but from time to time I decide to include my sig in a reply, and the first time I did this I noticed the extra line was missing.

Huh?

I checked the new sig. Yep, all fine. So where was this copy of the old version coming from? I thought maybe Outlook had cached it somewhere, so I restarted it. Made no difference. I rebooted the whole PC. Nope. So I resorted to a search of my whole disk for "Signatures."

Lo and behold, the default Signature folder had three copies of my standard sig, only one of which had the new date on it (and the new addition in it). I noticed the new one was an RTF file and of the unchanged ones, one was an HTML file and the other a text file. I had no recollection of creating these, but it was clearly no coincidence that the "problem" only occurred when replying to an email, and the two format options for replies are... HTML or text.

With a small light flickering into life in my head, I deleted the rogue files, returned to Outlook, fired up an email reply and inserted a signature. Whaddaya know... Outlook creates the other versions for you. How handy is that? Well... not very handy at all actually, seein' as it's not intelligent enough to spot when the original sig changes, and copy those changes over for you too.

Like I said. A bug.