Microsoft email warning

The problem lies in how Microsoft has decided to render (display) HTML emails. At the moment Outlook translates all mails using Explorer, in the 2007 edition they plan to use their word processing tool Word.

So what you ask?

Basically this means emails will be stripped down and be unable to use some of the more advanced techniques which give them their rich media appearance.

There will be:

no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
no support for forms
no support for Flash, or other plugins
no support for CSS floats
no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
no support for CSS positioning
no support for animated GIFs

Remember that Outlook is the email client: 70-80% of the corporate world uses it. As they start to upgrade to the first new Office release for 4 years, these potential customers could receive your email in a very unexpected format if your design team are not aware of the new restrictions.

Why would Microsoft choose to do this?

We could only think of a few reasons.

1. Security

There has been some problems with security on Internet Explorer. Even with a recent update with IE7, maybe Microsoft still doesn't completely trust it to keep your computer safe.

2. Consistency

Outlook uses Word as a default to create emails, so in one way it would make sense for emails to remain consistent between Outlook users.

3. The law

Microsoft has got into a lot of trouble before by forcing Internet Explorer on Windows users. Maybe they are trying to stifle the calls of monopoly by unbundling their products and allowing users to use whatever browser they like.

How can you still make the most of email?

Here at Refreshed we have always designed our emails to be compliant with all popular email clients on both Mac and PC platforms. Our rigorous testing means each email we design and send on behalf of a client, is assured to be able to be viewed by the widest possible audience. So to ensure this email newsletter could be viewed by everyone, we have constructed it as optimised images, eliminating the pitfalls of different formatting on the various email clients.

So our best tip for using email in the Outlook 2007 era use an agency that knows what they're doing!