With microsoft outlook, you click on “new” email, and start composing a new email. You fill in the subject and email recipient.

But when you get to writing the body of the email, you notice that the text formatting buttons are mostly greyed out (eg bold, underline, italics, cut, copy, paste, font size, font color, paragraph justification, bullets and numbering, indenting).

The solution is actually quite straightforward:

In the main email window (the one with the inbox on it):

tools -> options -> mail format -> compose in this message format: HTML