Outlook Express: how to edit email?

[TwoRails]

I often forward a lot of "joke" type emails that's been forwarded a gazillion times and I like to take out a lot of the embedded garbage and clean them up. (had one this morning that had at least 12 "ads" for AOL, Incredimail, etc...) A lot of it won't simply delete so I have to go to the "souce" tab.

I really am clueless to all the "code" that in there, though I am fairly successful at guessing and removed sections. If it blows up, I just start again.

Any simple "manuals" out there on learning the very basic editing of that stuff?

TIA

TR

[Force Flow]

For the most part, it's just HTML straight out of 1998 and inline CSS (which sometimes replaces some of that 1998 HTML)

Go ahead and try pasting the code into an HTML editor.

[TwoRails]

I'd love to paste some of it in an HTML editor..... but I don't have one. Any good, but basic / simple ways to learn HTML? And what's a good editor?

[glc]

I use Composer, which is part of the Mozilla Seamonkey suite.

[TwoRails]

Composer sounds like Netscape, so I copy-n-pasted an email into 4.x Composer and all that came up in a preview in Netscape was the source code I pasted.

So, I D/L'd and installed SeaMonkey, and dang, it sure looks like my old favorite Netscape 4.x -- I guess I'm doing something wrong, though. I again did a copy-n-paste of an email into this new Composer, saved the code as is requried before a preview, and the preview was again just the source code.

Am I incorrect in assuming that the email should look like it does in OE? It's a simple email: text, pic, text, then the junk at the bottom.

[TwoRails]

I know this is old hat to most of you, but this looks like a good place to start:

http://www.aksi.net/html-tutorial.htm

Any other tutorials for a newbie you can recommend?

[Force Flow]

http://www.w3schools.com/

That's a good place to start if you're looking to start HTML (or pretty much any other web language)