Grey Vertical Bars Lines in Outlook When You Reply

I've been struggling with this problem for years now but never took the time to figure out a easy way to deal with it. Often, we have an email thread and we want to reply all, only really to maintain the title and dist. list. We want to remove the email text, as it's just clutter/waste, or maybe we are changing the context/point of the email. We highlight all and hit delete, but instead of starting with a clean / blank email, we see one,two,three, or more vertical grey bars which CANNOT be deleted or backspaced away. The bars look like this:

 
 I noticed this was only an issue when using HTML as the format for the message. A simple fix for this is to change to Plain Text and then back again if you need HTML.

 

 That's it, the bars will disappear!! Little trick is going to save me so much frustration.

There is a way to remove original emails when replying, but I didn't want to do that, because most of the time I like to keep the entire thread. Sometimes, I want to delete it.