MSoft refuse to let its browser render emails in html format in Outlook 2010 and are using WORD instead

Why do I need to worry how Outlook renders html emails?

Well, it's most basic function is to cost you MORE money when you want to do an email marketing campaign. It's a very simple argument. At the moment, if you create a rich html email for any purpose be it marketing or otherwise, you have to spend a lot of time tweaking it, or even rewrite it for it to display correctly in all email clients AND in Outlook. Quite simply put, Outlook is the odd one out.

We website design experts use something called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to configure layout and apperance of both websites and email marketing messages. The thing is, this is a standard. It set back in 1996 and, interestingly, Outlook 2000 had pretty good support for this standard. It let's us set display and positioning attributes of the various elements of a web page to make it look good and to keep all the formatting OUT of the main body of the code. We can reuse parts cutting out the need for duplicate formatting information on similar elements. It makes things much easier and keeps things nice and neat.

While the support for this standard in internet explorer is not perfect, it is WAY better than in Microsoft Word. As a result of all this, when you receive and Html email in Outlook, it uses Microsoft Word to display it on the screen. That's right, Word. The word processing package. As a result, much of the formatting from CSS does not display correctly and the mail looks awful. We have found that this can, in some cases, double the amount of work needed to produce a good looking html email that displays correctly for everyone who receives it.

The "Email Standards Project" (The ESP) was set up to effectively fill a gap which noone else was taking time to fill and that was to campaign for industry agreed standards for email. They have REALLY got going on this topic, quite understandably. Microsoft really had the chance to make a difference with this new version of Outlook and to really help our industry (web site desingers and email marketers). Their only real argument as far as we can tell, is that they believe Word to be a very rich email composition tool and to be more secure than internet explorer as it won't run any scripts (bits of code embedded in a page which by some, can be utilised to be malicious).

Bizarrely, this is not the issue.

Let's get the easiest point out of the way first:

Noone advocates using scripts in html emails, it's a bad idea and most browsers can be set not to run them anyway.

Now the main point...

The ESP are not complaining about word being used to create emails, they're complaining about it being used to RENDER (i.e. view) html emails. I have to say, despite quite often being a bit of a closet Microsoft-phile, this has got up my nose a little. To cut a long story short, we are a little frustrated with having to reformat everything we do just because Microsoft in some part won't and in some part, half heartedly, adopt standards proposed and agreed by other leading industry figures. It's bad enough that we have to rework websites to work with internet explorer but to have to totally rewrite html emails gets a little tedious and, at the end of the day, just ends up costing clients time and money.

Anyway, we don't need to rant on about this, we thought it would be useful for you to understand the basic premise of the argument and that people are trying to get things changed for your benenfit.

You can visit the ESP site here,and see Microsoft's strange response here

Onward and upwards

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