Then what would cause a message not to be italicized. Is it truly the case
that Outlook only sends messages with italicized subject lines, or is it the
case that messages eligible for sending end up having their subject lines
italicized as a result and that another marker is actually used to identify
transmission-eligible messages?
Messages submitted for sending have a special flag set in them which causes
Outlook to display them as italicized. What would cause a message to be
sent *not* to be italicized is a third-party program that scans outgoing
messages, but which doesn't behave properly.
In order to open and scan an outgoing message, such a program needs to
abort the submission of the message for sending. If that program, for some
reason, does not re-submit the message for sending after the scan, the
message will show as un-italicized and will not be sent.
If the former, how does one force a message to become acceptable for
transmission without having to first compose it, then send it, then forward
it, and then click send/receive? This same behavior does not occur if one
has selected the option to transmit messages immediately after clicking the
send button. It seems only to occur if one has elected to allow items to
remain in the Outbox and to be swept every n minutes in a bulk transmission.
Was this by design, or is it the result of an unfortunate interaction between
Norton Internet Security and Outlook 2003?
Turn off Norton's scanning of outgoing messages - it has often been the
culprit in problems like this. From what I've seen in the various
newsgroups, you may need to uninstall Norton, reboot, then reinstall it
without the scanning options in order to really turn off the scanning.