Microsoft have just confirmed they plan on using the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position and no background images. Not to mention the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft have confirmed they want to hear your feedback on this decision. It’s time for the email marketing and design community to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.
What’s the best way to do that? Twitter of course.

Visit fixoutlook.org to see how you can help and what the community is saying right now.

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8 Comments

  1. I hate to say this, but there is no place in the world for HTML emails. With hacking and software insecurity as big of a problem as it currently is, any decent company strips out the HTML before it reaches the users inbox.

    Also, any idea how your fancy HTML email looks when it has been stripped to the basic text format?

    I’ve lost count of workstations taken over through HTML injection attacks.

  2. Lol, people actually still use Outlook? Is this 1997?

  3. Hmm… I guess I don’t find Daniel’s assertion to be true in my experience. I have worked for several large companies, including the largest computer company in the world (three letter acronym, starts with an I ends with an M), and html emails arrived in fine condition. I was in the software biz for 25 years and I never recall having html email infect my machine. Virus scanners and firewalls usually do the trick, if they are maintained.

    Back to the issue, I have seen the comments like: don’t use Outlook, which are specious really. The world uses it and we want them to see our well-formatted message. That is really the point even if we want to use Pine :-) (Inside geek reference)

    Adrien

  4. I’m actually feelin JRD on this one. I have many geeks as friends (they come in useful) and everyone complains about Microsoft and highly recommends using open source alternatives. I use Thunderbird myself.

  5. as a matter of fact using Word for rendering is a wise decision as you don’t need anymore CSS and and the render engine can be setup in order to avoid html and javascript security risks.

    for anything else i fully agree the last thing we need is HTML emails with bells and whistles : emails are supposed to be TEXT messages.

  6. I enthusiastically agree with the comments above regarding html not belonging in email to begin with. Not to mention… “email campaigns”? You want me to get behind an effort to make it easier for people to send me bloated spam?

    “Wrecking email campaigns” sounds like a great idea, to me.

  8. And my web designer says:

    your emails from Agency Access are basically an embedded photo with a link (it is not really a full html page email) so this really should not matter – ‘sides this is why you pay them, they have to figure it out

    your emails using Mail’s templates might matter if someone you send to is using outlook 2010

    but since outlook 2010 will probably require windows 7 and windows 7 has a couple of major hurdles to overcome

    windows 7 is going to have to compete with XP (XP’s market share is still around 72%, vista is only at 19% over two years after its release – most companies & lot of homeowners didn’t/won’t/can’t upgrade)
    (I am not sure how a company competes against it’s own obsolete unsupported software without bashing itself )
    unless the economy turns around really fast, most companies and people have other things more pressing to spend money on right now than new computers
    (if they can get 7 to work well on older machines – this would speed up its adoption – but they won’t/can’t, pc companies need to sell computers and Microsoft needs the pc companies to stay in business to sell software)

    I can’t see 7 getting adopted too quickly so I am not sure how much this is going to effect anyone anytime soon

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