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1. JohnK
   June 6, 2007 11:29am

   I’ve only just “upgraded” to Outlook 2007, and I am distressed and furious at the impact the Word HTML engine is having on my email life.
   So many of the email newsletters I subscribe to are either garbled, completely broken, or send Outlook into 100% CPU hell. Everything worked fine in Outlook 2003. MS took a very good email client and wrecked it.
   Just one example:
   http://www.newsparadise.com/outlook/outlook.htm

2. Collin
   June 7, 2007 9:29am

   Frankly, I think one viable option for us developers is to simply keep developing and producing emails exactly as we have been… using CSS and otherwise current standards. When all these emails start breaking (as they already have), and clients start calling us and telling us about it, we can politely refer them back to Microsoft.

   Let Microsoft explain to their own customers why things suddenly don’t work as they have for the past 5+ years. We didn’t break anything. They did. They can therefore fix it. I for one refuse to give in to this sort of garbage.

   There is but one way to quash Microsoft’s arrogance, and that is to stop creating workarounds and direct the mess they create right back to them.

3. Jean
   June 14, 2007 8:07pm

   I use Crystal Reports 11 and send the report in HTML format to my client who is using Outlook 2007. What shall i do? Ask my client to downgrade their Outlook? :)

4. Greg
   June 16, 2007 3:53am

   As with most of you, I can’t believe that “they” keep making choices to throw aside interoperability and web standards.  How can a company say they are serious about helping their customers advance into the modern age of technology when they do silly things like this that show that they don’t overly care about interoperability, or the people that are really working with their products.

   Why is it that I have an e-mail signature created by Word that is 12k, filled with if statements, and duplicate content, and poorly constructed style-sheets, which should simply fit into a 1k simple HTML doc?  How much are they complicating peoples lives and increasing the size of wasted data being sent around the internet?

5. Lee Carré
   June 19, 2007 12:27pm

   A note on alternative operating systems, especially at the point of purchase:

   Dell have once again started tinkering with linux on it’s range of desktops and laptops back in February this year.

   It has since been reported that Dell have committed to offering a linux distro installed as an option in May.

6. Jonathan Peterson
   June 20, 2007 3:50am

   You know, this really sucks from the point of view of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

   If we’re sending CSS styled emails they can be restyled by a reader by forcing their own style sheet in webmail.  But Microsoft is forcing us to send emails that are significantly worse for visually impaired readers - ensuring that the text only version, that should be the last option will be the only option.

   I wonder if using word to format and render was done to justify Microsoft’s claim that Outlook is NOT a web-based product
   http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=3&url=http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/2/3/c23bc250-5f80-4d0c-a29d-877355ff91e8/Microsoft%20Office%20Outlook%202007%20VPAT.doc&ei=-AV4RondNI3IggSY3o2pCA&usg=AFQjCNE8PA2kxLQbZBdVOidG5oPSiV3EHw&sig2=uPVyVXh-8_uXRkWzWbv-9w

   I’d be willing to bet that the National Federation for the Blind threatening a lawsuit over Outlook 2007 would be a HUGE push towards using a standards compliant render engine as the default over world.

7. Stefan
   June 26, 2007 11:12pm

   http://www.zeldman.com/2007/06/08/e-mail-is-not-a-platform-for-design/

   Nuff said.

8. Dave Greiner
   June 27, 2007 10:36am

   Maybe you missed this Stefan.

9. Vanarie
   July 12, 2007 5:36am

   The XBOX newsletter header (“can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007”) makes it clear that Microsoft is VERY off base when it comes to serving the public with efficient, logical programs. This is a huge dis-service to every email creator in the business and gives everyone yet another reason to migrate to OpenOffice and Thunderbird. How could they be so stupid? It baffles me. It’s the tail wagging the dog.

   Another gripe is that you can NOT easily opt-out of the XBOX newsletter. There’s no one step “click here to unsubscribe”. They say “If you do not wish to receive marketing e-mails from Xbox, please update your contact preferences on My Xbox”. Arrogant!

10. hddn_agnda
    August 15, 2007 2:44am

    So many people complaining about format standards…

    I am sorry to tell you this, but so long as the majority of users are using Microsoft products, it does not matter who says what standards belong where.  Microsoft IS THE standards creator until such time as they lose their lead in the market.

11. Sid
    August 25, 2007 3:11pm

    MS sucks.  I am tired of always having to explain to people why, because most common users don’t understand the tech behind web standards, and really don’t care.  It’s like saying Pres. Bush sucks. People just don’t care and will wait until something else comes along - hoping it will be better because it’s new.

    As for HTML/XHTML emails, (which is what this blog is about, right?)  Outlook isn’t our only enemy.  Web-based email readers have troubles, too. Probably cause they’re based off of Outlook.  Stepping back in standards acceptance is just a slap in the face to developers, designers, and end-users.

    Open-source, please save us.

12. pj
    September 7, 2007 3:40am

    Yeah - M$ sucks big time. Seems every office upgrade starting from 2.0 up to 2007 has broken things. So now I can’t copy and paste an image in Outlook 2007 and email to a Lotus Notes user. I’m going to format and reload my laptop AGAIN because M$ F*#Ks it up so much that I have to do this about every 18 months.

    Lotus Domino 8 has its own office suite bundled into the product. Our office users will be using that and we will be dumping M$ quicker than a cup of cold coffee.

    My next laptop WILL BE A MAC and in the meantime I’ll go back to 2003.

13. MM
    September 15, 2007 12:22am

    From an personalized email perspective, the best way to create compelling concepts, is the ability to put personalized text over a background image inside a tag. Without that capability, it’s just the same “[First Name] [Last Name], get 10% off when you buy XX” garbage.

    This is a tremendous step backward with regards to marketing. Please MS, get this done, and get it done right! At the very least, support the CSS that would allow users to put a background image.

    Does Outlook Express still exist? Does it also suffer from the same “upgrade”?

14. briansage
    September 21, 2007 2:20pm

    Here’s an idea—we CAN do about this—are there any ActiveX gurus out there that can write an ActiveX add-on for Outlook that swaps the Word rendering engine for Gecko?

    Seriously, is anything from MS going to save standards? They’ve demonstrated they don’t care. The world has finally mobilized behind standards, and MS demonstrates that they absolutely don’t care at every turn.

    The best solution:
    “Subscribe to our email by clicking [Install]”

15. Dave Fearnley
    September 25, 2007 2:58am

    First off, I agree that the decision regarding Outlook’s rendering engine is beyond ignorant and arogant. But instead of just complaining, I thought that I would try and provide a solution that may work for some people…

    In response MM’s question about Outlook Express. Bingo! I am not sure why more people don’t use this simple free client. It won’t run macros - providing an extra layer of protection against that style of attack. Sure it may have some problems, but like I said - its free.

    I have always used Outlook Express and have found that it is the best tool for sending HTML emails to different clients - including Outlook 2007 and the various Mac clients. Just make sure that you use inline styles and absolute URLs to refer to your images that exist on a website somewhere.

    I suppose OE uses the IE engine because that is what ships with the OS.

    In fact, I have the best success with creating my html in my preferred editor, and then simply copying everything between the body tags (do not include the body tags) and paste it into the source tab of your OE composition window (or the html tab of your web mail - SmarterMail has this). Then click back to the edit or preview pane.

    You will notice that once you change tabs your email source will be modified (massacred?) but it should display fine. Just don’t try and edit in your client. If you need to make changes, perform those in your favourite editor and do a wholesale copy / paste as before. After a bit of practice you will be able to learn what you can and cannot do, but I have been able to use background images and colours.

    Always be sure to do a test send to your friends with other platforms and email clients to test continuity.

    P.S. I will switch to FireFox when they can manage to layer backgrounds or properly support nested tables and centering with css

16. Microtired
    October 2, 2007 7:58pm

    I have to say the HTML handling in outlook 2007 is absolutely god awful, it is inconsistent and unreliable. Altering an HTML mail when forwarding a sent mail for instance causes plenty of formatting problems that are unsolvable by any other method than taking the entire text piece to notepad and altering it there.

    And this substandard, memory heavy, crash prone and alltogther frustrating product is getting worse? I’m the systems administrator at my company and we’re going to move away from outlook all together now.

17. Joern
    October 19, 2007 4:58am

    Currently, the creation of HTML emails that render well under different mail clients is next to impossible and standards compliance within mail clients is a joke. MS needs to make a stand, break a few eggs, use IE, and create a delicious standards compliant omelette.

18. DJKC
    November 2, 2007 4:32pm

    There is no excuse for taking options away with new updates.  The ability to use animation should be available somewhere in MS Office.  I hope they see changes that go “backwards” upset the customers…which is US.

19. Frank Meyer
    November 8, 2007 10:29am

    As with most of you, I can’t believe that “they” keep making choices to throw aside interoperability and web standards. How can a company say they are serious about helping their customers advance into the modern age of technology when they do silly things like this that show that they don’t overly care about interoperability, or the people that are really working with their products.

20. Mark
    November 14, 2007 5:35pm

    Do I have to beg Microsoft to abide by accepted standards such as html and css?

    My livelyhood depends on MS abilty to deliver quality.

    I am a pauper.

21. sickmind fraud
    November 23, 2007 2:47pm

    It is also a basic Microsoft tactic to break something in everyone elses products so that everyone is forced to comply with Microsoft standards.

    On the basis that Microsoft knows best, and everyone should just use Outlook anyhow. Not that anyone else’s opinions are that important as it is.

    The upside to this is more sales for Microsoft.

    or else we fork the internet email system.

22. Jim
    December 20, 2007 2:44pm

    I am a user who has to switch between Office 2000 and office 2007 for different clients. The effect of not being able to send html pages by email (“Send page by email”) function is ruining my contact with people. In addition, the fact that incoming responses to categorised messages I send have the category deleted makes it annoying for my team of staff.

    How can something be an upgrade when it takes away basic functionality?

23. DirtyFrank
    January 5, 2008 9:34am

    Why don’t all of us developers just stop bending over backwards for Microsoft and only develop for standards-compliant browsers and email clients? That will force Microsoft to get their asses in gear because they’ll be hearing nothing but complaints from all the regular people who won’t know why their browsers don’t work. I think a lot of these people will at least try to find out why this is happening to them and make the switch to Firefox.

24. dave
    January 9, 2008 8:03pm

    I cannot believe this.  All my hard work looks good anywhere but in Outlook 2007, which I had been highly recommending to my clients.  Just when I was getting the hang of CSS in Dreamweaver, now I have to relearn the old way.  I am schocked at MS and am speechless.  It just makes NO SENSE and I do not care what their reason is it is not good enough, no way.  Dave

25. Nathan Campbell
    January 25, 2008 4:13am

    it breaks outlook to outlook as well. In my business, I send screenshots all the time (Alt-PrintScreen) - it strips those out as well. It has really screwed my ability to easily and effectivley get work done.

26. Harold Fuchs
    January 29, 2008 9:27pm

    Does all this mean that if I use Outlook but choose not to use Microsoft Office then I can’t render or see HTML e-mails?

    If so then why isn’t it illegal under EU and/or US restrictive practices legislation?

27. Michael
    February 2, 2008 10:54am

    Well, you can always add a “If you’re using Outlook 2007, you’d better read the web version” link to the top of your CM emails :-)

    As for the rest of the automated emails we send out ... I guess close-to-plain-text is going to be popular very soon ;)

28. Harvey
    February 16, 2008 7:37am

    It’s simple. Microsoft forgot (again) that there is an outside world. Microsoft will get into trouble for this, and they won’t have a clue why.

29. Restaurant
    February 25, 2008 9:44pm

    Microsoft has clearly learned from decades of competition with Apple that there is no profit in unambiguity. Why not leverage a dominating market share and take control over “what is yours”? Problem is, Apple does it with style, promoting uniqueness while at the same time embracing prospering standards.

    With all the flare of rich internet applications, I figured it was only a matter of time before a secure email based application was completely feasable. So much for that idea. I will however be very impressed if any of our comments create any kind of change. The only way to make a statement is to not use the software at all and that is simply not possible.

30. Dave
    March 3, 2008 6:28am

    Microsoft say they have made a decision to render html woth the word engine rather than IE, but why and whats going on, I am no real techie, but using Publisher 2007 to create a html newsletter and then uploading the html to a site, reading it back with IE and then trying to forward the page.  This doesn’t work the page breaks up, it sounds to me Microsoft software doesn’t talk to each other, let alone the boffins at Microsoft.

31. John
    March 4, 2008 4:10am

    I found quite a few of these comments funny.  I personally don’t like how Microsoft doesn’t comply with standards, however telling people to use alternative desktops isn’t an answer.  If you work with large corporations they could care less about what you think.  MS supports a lot of these customers very well (I work for one and deal with MS for their products on a regular basis).  This isn’t a large issue for these companies and MS is well grounded in these organizations.

    I just find these waring messages funny.  I use both Windows and Linux but I also live in the real world and know that there is not going to be any massive revolt against MS in the private sector that will slightly diminish their corporate sector.

32. lexie
    March 11, 2008 2:31pm

    Can someone answer a question for me…

    What versions of outlook does that actually effect?

33. Dave Greiner
    March 12, 2008 8:30am

    This affects Outlook 2007 Lexie.

34. Paul
    March 13, 2008 1:26pm

    It’s really helpful for me to read these comments. I’m about an inch away from saying “screw Outlook 2007—if everyone’s content looks bad in it, maybe the Outlook team will be moved to make changes.”

    I mean why should my life be hell because of a “strategic decision” by Microsoft? They’re not the only game in town. Besides Outlook 2007 is…not my favorite. :)

35. PSD to HTML
    March 30, 2008 1:09pm

    While Outlook 2007 in general is a disappointment (as is Microsoft in general), but I can say with confidence that I’m glad Molly is a voice of reason now for Microsoft. Maybe MS will get it right this decade?

36. Ruth Moore
    April 5, 2008 7:51am

    One of our largest clients is a company who sends out hundreds of thousands of HTML e-mails to their opt-in customers every month.  These e-mails are welcomed and widely popular.  My company does the HTML coding for these mailings and the new Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Mail have turned my job into a living nightmare at times.  In specific response to what Colin M posted about the changes not having much of an effect on HTML e-mail designers, well, all I can say is that you are crazy.  My biggest complaint with the changes is that from everything I can tell, when Word renders the HTML it seems to take any transparent image named spacer.gif and arbitrarily resize it from pixels to points and I do mean arbitrarily - there is no rhyme or reason to it.  I may have a spacer that is 150 pixels X 124 pixels and in one instance it is resized to 62.8 points X 14.9 points and in another to 12.3 points by 246.98 points.  HUH?  I have found the way to get around this is to create a separate spacer 10 X 10 of whatever background color I need, and name it xxxx.jpg, then use it instead of a single transparent 1 px. gif and it is NOT resized for me.  This is the only way I have been able to get my HTML to hold together.  I know I am not the only designer with these problems as I am always receiving HTML e-mails, from Pizza Hut or Sonic, as an example, where people’s heads are sitting on their butts instead of their necks!

    Microsoft has taken not just 1, but 100 steps backwards.

    The only good thing I can say is that is has provided many more hours of work and a great deal of job security.

    Ruth Moore

37. Jeff Jungblut
    April 12, 2008 4:36pm

    I’ve been working on redesigning the company’s weekly community magazine web site for the past few weeks using CSS as much as possible. I pat myself on the back for that even though no one else in the company even knows or could care what CSS is, including the self-proclaimed freelance “web designer” (aka dreamweaver user) who couldn’t read or write actual HTML code to save his life.

    However, the company’s weekly newsletter is a total nightmare. I’m going to have to completely redesign the template we’ve been using the past two years because what looks perfect in YahooMail, AOL, Entourage, and Apple Mail and acceptable in Outlook ‘03 is unreadable crap in Hotmail and Gmail and appears fairly broken in Outlook ‘07.

    I was told by the publisher’s assistant that we need to change the newsletter colors because the text appears black on a dark blue background on his Hotmail account. I told him that Hotmail is being dumb, the text we send is white, but I’ll look into the problem. He tells me it may be hotmail being dumb but I have to fix it anyway otherwise people can’t read it. I ask him how long has this been happening, a couple weeks or two years, and mention that I wish I’d been notified sooner. He says it’s been happening at least three weeks.

    I can do table layouts, no problem there. But even table layouts aren’t a sure-fire fix for layout problems. Gmail doesn’t seem to support cellpadding in table tags, for instance. Table cellpadding was a workaround I was trying to use for whitespace between columns because Hotmail doesn’t support CSS margin, and another client (can’t recall which) didn’t support CSS padding. Without a consistent and predictable way to specify whitespace between an element’s border and its content, the design is hopelessly screwed.

    I’m a PHP/MYSQL + CSS web developer, not an HTML mail designer. I didn’t want the email job. I’m pulling what’s left of my hair out.

38. John Kantor
    April 18, 2008 3:15pm

    You can’t be that stupid. It only has to do with Microsoft wanting to gain more control over your desktop. More egomaniacal paranoia from Bill.

39. Jonathan D
    April 29, 2008 12:38pm

    As far as I know, most Outlook e-mail templates are so corny much of the enterprise/corporate client-base stays away from them. So why increase support for an aspect of the program that is generally considered vestigial?

    I’m responsible for hundreds of thousands of legit, non-spam e-mails and this whole Outlook 2007 mess is taking years off my life-expectancy.

40. John
    May 1, 2008 2:48am

    There is a posting that you can vote to have animated GIF’s back.  If we get enough people to vote, hopefully we’ll get the features back.

    http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?mid=d7118c2d-78aa-41e8-96fa-b1c11deccb09&dg=microsoft.public.design.gallery

41. Bleh
    May 19, 2008 12:21am

    Sorry, but I prefer the Word HTML engine. It cuts down on a LOT of remote execution exploits. It’s a lot harder to get a virus just from opening the wrong email- you have to manually execute EXEs from untrusted sources.

    Sure, they can improve the engine, but the word engine lacks a lot of the security lacking problems (e.x. ActiveX) of the IE engine.

     

    Just my $.02 as an Outlook 2007 user.

42. sindbad
    June 26, 2008 12:42am

    In my office I was forced to work on office 2007 -> I mean outlook. Ok, I understand, that microsoft is trying to make us live better but not easier!!!! First and the foremost - the sending box is failed! all e-mails in sending box I had to send one by one myself. the program won’t send it all automatically. Anybody know how to fix it???? best regards

43. OldNavyDude
    June 28, 2008 5:48am

    ok.  most are spewing, whining, complaining, venting etc about how microscoft is forcing everyone to their way, and refusing to comply with well established “Standards”.  .... and how we HAVE to comply because of market share, no viable ‘commercial’ alternatives, etc. etc. etc.

    Ok look… I dislike them and their ways as well, but come on!  WAH!  Get over it!

    MS, like it or not, IS the (defacto) standard. Standards come and go, and anyone can publish a specification and call it a standard.  Even the word “STANDARD” has multiple meanings.  Look at <a href=“http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Standard.” rel=“nofollow”>http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Standard.</a>  Whats relevant here is definition “3: something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example.”  Most germane is “general consent”. 

    With overwhelming marketshare, it’s hard to argue against ‘general consent’.  No one holds a gun to our head.  We may not like our alternatives, and given the choices, we ‘consent’ to use MS products, even if it is begrudgingly granted.  We vote with our purchases.  Alternatively, how many individuals actually VOTED to ratify anything published by the W3C?  How many of YOU voted? And yet we all consider the Standards published by the W3C (or IETF or IEEE or… ) as having more validity.  What a bunch of crap!.

    I don’t like what MS does much of the time, and I love the concept of open source, but unless and until we, the MASSES, adopt a different way of doing what we do, then MS is, and will remain ‘The STANDARD’.

    Note that nothing I’ve commented on is an excuse or apology for the heavy-handed, uncaring, and seemingly irrational methods the company uses to operate.  It is simply the way it is. 

    Change it.  Use Linux, use a MAC, use something else…, and convince the rest of the world to join the revolution.

44. Restaurant
    August 8, 2008 6:16am

    I’m damn sick of having to muck about just to get stuff to render correctly in IE. So even if they had used the IE engine we would still be screwed.

    May as well just send everything in plain text with a link and a strong suggestion that people use Firefox.

    Both issues need a strongly worded web petition. Both issues are just lazy work covered up by some crap excuse.

45. Firma kostenlos eintragen
    August 29, 2008 7:01pm

    As long as the majority of computers sold come with Windows installed Microsoft products will continue to dominate. If you want to break that paradigm it must be done at the point of sale. Don’t waste time whining.

    The only thing remaining is to be honest about your needs. Most people dont actually “need” advanced HTML rendering in Outlook. Most people who insist on it are the types responsible for the vast majority of viri in this world spreading. Imagine if people who think more=better where just told -NO-, it’s tough if you want some crazy thing done with email, if you want a webpage then put a link to that webpage in your email.

46. Jack T
    September 11, 2008 6:03pm

    It’s pretty crazy over there in Microsoft land.

    I’m not sure if this is a realistic option for our clients - but it is the RIGHT decision as human beings:

    DONT SUPPORT OUTLOOK 07

    IE6 is seriously bad enough. IE7 is even bad enough. But this! It is just so pathetic on their part that as a self respecting web developer, I refuse to support Outlook 07 with my email designs past the point of “you will be able to read it”.

    I honestly don’t think there is any point talking to Microsoft about something like this. It’s obvious its a business decision (to screw anyone over that isn’t running by theire rules). They only changed IE when they realised that it had a competitor they couldn’t ignore. Unfortunately Outlook doesn’t have a competitor.

    It’s a use it or loose it deal guys.

47. Haustiere
    September 11, 2008 9:17pm

    Tired old MS vs A retorts aside, this is bad news as I’m a new user less than a year in to my ‘Campaign Monitoring’ and starting to really get into the swing of creative HTML emails. I can’t believe I’ve now got to tone that down and retro-scale to make sure the PC users I’m sending to can read my mails.

    Oh the confusion. I’m going to be studying this post carefully.

48. Diagnose online
    September 14, 2008 9:27am

    In previous versions of Outlook, I could reply back and then the person I was corresponding with would be notified by e-mail (and the comment would appear on a web page in a thread). Now the forms don’t work, and I have to click on a link to reply directly at the web page itself. It’s just an extra layer of annoyance and a time waster that really bugs me.

49. Candy
    November 1, 2008 7:47pm

    I’m not so sure middle or upper management ever hear from us. We complain to the tech or in the feedback comments, but they obviously don’t go anywhere. They might get some ideas from carefully set up queries given to especially selected users, but that isn’t me. So it really irks me when I hear them say they listen to me, they haven’t listened yet. The techs are nice and try hard, but they can’t do anything when it comes down to “uhh, I’m sorry but that’s just the way it’s made.” 2007 wasn’t ready for release and Vista definately wasn’t, isn’t. Come to think of neither were any of their other releases. They charge a fortune for products that are broken. If I could afford to, I would buy a Mac and tell Microsoft where to go. Heck, they’re headed there anyway for all the torture they have placed on the world. Except, I suppose I would still be forced to use Microsoft Office products for compatibility.

50. Steve
    November 19, 2008 10:56pm

    I long for the day when Outlook loses market share as IE did. Only then we will start to see a product that will work how the majority of people want it to and not how some bunch of suits in a board meeting think it should.

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