Answering within a Reply or Forward adds my name

I am facing an issue where my username automatically appears inside the body of an email I reply to or forward.

Whenever I hit on the spacebar as the first character to start editing or answering within the quoted email message, my username will appear as [John] in the email message.

Is there any way to turn this off?

Preface Comments buttonWhen answering in-line (meaning, within the original message text), Outlook has the option to mark these as comments.

By default it will use your name, but you can configure it to something else and also simply disable this option if you don’t like it at all.

Preface comments with…

You can find this option by going to;

  • File-> Options-> section Mail-> option group: Replies and forwards-> option: Preface comments with

The Preface Comments feature automatically adds your name when typing within the original quoted text of a Reply or Forward.
The Preface Comments feature automatically adds your name when typing within the original quoted text of a Reply or Forward.

Undo the preface insertion for some emails

If you like to leave the feature on but not use it for all emails, you can hit CTRL+Z when your name gets inserted to quickly undo this insertion and write your comment or changes without the preface.

Note 1: When adding comments to a HTML or Rich Text formatted email message, it will use the same color as that you have configured for replying to or forwarding messages.

Note 2: For an overview of the location of popular features in Outlook see the guide; Where do I find…?