Enough is Enough: Outlook 2010 To Use Word To Render Emails

I just received an email from the Email Standards Project saying that Outlook 2010 will also be using Word to render emails. I've copied the email below:

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.

Comments

[Tricia]

And when I mean CSS I mean inline CSS formatting of course...

[Tricia]

I think there's some confusion here about what's going on...

They are talking about the platform used to Read/Receive or interpret an HTML e-mail message, not to create a message. So instead of using a web-standard way of receiving e-mail messages, they are using Word.

This is a problem for e-mail designers like myself because I will have to take into account the fact that my layout/code will probably not look right in Outlook compared to all the other e-mail clients out there. It's already hard enough to design for various kinds of web-standard based e-mail clients, let alone one that reads e-mail off of a completely different platform.

Oh, and yes, while I agree that there is a vast difference between e-mail and web (I don't want flashy, fancy, ridiculous design in my e-mails thank you), I want my messages to stand out from the slew of other messages out there. A simple, classy design utilizing simple CSS and images will achieve that, but I still have to play around with the code to get it to work properly in a Word-based e-mail client.

So bottom line, the problem is that Microsoft is trying to create their own way of reading web e-mails instead of complying to standard web practices. It's just a huge headache for us designers and totally unnecessary.

And Twitter is a unique way to both get out the word and directly show Microsoft the number of people unhappy with this change.

[Nasser]

Frankly speaking, I don't understand what is at stake here. I use Microsoft Word for authoring emails in Outlook, I love, it works and I don't want to change it, I will even resist to it. If there is functionality missing in Word that you need for your business, please work with Microsoft engineering and marketing to include it. It is not by asking them to drop Word that you would success especially as tens of millions of people are happy with that and don't want or plan to change. Twitter is not the way to get things done. Get to Microsoft directly.

[Deirdre Baird]

When Outlook 07 came out, we wrote an extensive guide on what is different in Outlook 07's rendering engine vs older versions along with tips for email designers. The URL for accessing this guide to designing emails for Outlook is here:

http://www.pivotalveracity.com/reports/PivotalVeracity_2007study_Outlook_Design_Guide.pdf

[Thomas]

email and newsletters are not webpages! they should transport information. i don't understand whay alot of people want css design in emails? waht is the core of email marketing? to create a most beautifull newsletter? No just transfer important information simple, quick an easy!!!