I recently had problems printing out emails in Outlook Express, the mail client I use on Microsoft Windows. Usually Outlook Express will leave about 2 cm blank between the edge of the paper and the start of the text. Instead it started so far to the left that the first character was cut off.

Outlook Express has no “Page Setup” option in its File menu to configure margins. So how come the margins had changed and how could I fix it? As it turned out, Outlook Express considers itself a part of Internet Explorer, components of which it shares for rendering text and other purposes.

The reason I lost the margin was that when I printed my nengajō (Japanese New Year’s Cards) for 2011 two months ago I had tweaked the IE printing margins to the minimum. Since I usually use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome as a browser, I had not noticed I had left IE with those settings — until I came to print emails in Outlook Express, that is.

The fix was easy: Launch Internet Exporer, go to File => Page Setup => Margins and set Left / Right / Top / Bottom back to 0.75 if using inches or the equivalent in centimetres if using metric. Voila, OE will print with the standard margins again.