Blog

When I posted about Microsoft's decision to use Word instead of Internet Explorer to render HTML emails in Outlook 2007, I certainly didn't expect the storm of controversy and (sometimes) constructive discussion that eventuated. The post has already breached 300 comments and made the front page of Digg, Del.icio.us and Techmeme within a few hours. Heck, we even managed to land the number five spot on Alexa's fasting moving sites on the web. This is clearly a topic many of you are passionate about.

So why did Microsoft make this change?

In my post, I chanced a guess at Microsoft's motivations for this change:

By default Outlook uses the Word engine to create HTML emails, which it's done for years now. Perhaps Microsoft figured that in order to keep the look and feel of emails consistent between Outlook users they'd display emails using the same engine that created them.

As diplomatically explained by Molly Holzschlag, it turns out that this is exactly why Microsoft made the change. It has nothing to do with security or the remnants of an anti-trust decision. I'm not going to harp on about what I think about this decision - I can certainly understand Microsoft's motivation for making the change. It's been made, and the best thing for us to do now is deal with it and use our frustration to constructively encourage Microsoft to resolve the existing issues with the Word rendering engine.

What can you do?

Molly is currently working closely with Microsoft as part of the Microsoft/WaSP Task Force and points out this refreshing fact - Microsoft is prepared to listen.

Please comment as to your experiences and include any links to problem cases. I promise to make sure the top priorities and concerns get in front of the right eyes. Microsoft was very clear in letting me know that if we want a feature and need it and get an organized list to them, those issues will be addressed and prioritized as the new engine develops in response to developer needs, too.

As email designers, all we have to do is provide examples of our older CSS based designs that are now breaking in Outlook 2007. The obvious challenge there is that most of us don't have a copy yet (it's being released publicly next month), so these reports may take some time to trickle through.

At any rate, I encourage anyone who has noticed any discrepancies in their email designs using a pre-release version of Outlook 2007 to chime in on Molly's post with the URL of your email and a short explanation of what's breaking. If you don't have a copy yet, you can also test Outlook 2007 support using SiteVista, which we reviewed recently.