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Sending a final message to Microsoft about Outlook 2010

July 14, 2009

It's been just shy of 3 weeks since we launched fixoutlook.org, and it's safe to say the project has been a phenomenal success. Almost 25,000 people have joined the chorus to send a unified message to Microsoft about their lack of web standards support in Outlook 2010. On top of this, there has been considerable coverage across the web from small blogs to major news sites. We've even had some fantastic, thoughtful responses from another member of the Office team (who officially filed a bug about the lack of standards) and a Microsoft MVP.

To bring this great project to a close, we wanted to make sure the Outlook team had a constant reminder of just how strongly we all feel about their lack of standards support. Trending topics on Twitter come and go, we wanted something a little more permanent we could send their way.

The fixoutlook.org Mosaic

In his reply to the fixoutlook campaign, Microsoft's William Kennedy told us that there "is no consensus" about what standards apply to email and that he'd work with the industry if a consensus arises. Luckily for us, these standards already exist. They're called web standards.

To make sure William got the point, we figured we'd send him a "consensus" from 25,000 of us, many of who (myself included) are Outlook customers. From this idea, the fixoutlook.org mosaic was born. In a single image, it includes almost all of the 25,000 people who joined us in asking Microsoft to fix standards support in Outlook 2010.

Here's a preview of the mosaic. You can click it for the full sized version, which is a rather large 20MB and might take a while to download.

We've used the different colored avatars from everyone who contributed to spell out a final message to Microsoft. We figured saying please this time couldn't hurt our chances.

As I write this, the 2m x 1m mosaic is just boarding a plane on it's way to Redmond, personally addressed to Mr Kennedy on behalf of everyone who contributed.

To give you an idea of scale, here's a shot of us holding the mosaic.

A big final thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about the importance of the fixoutlook campaign. On a more personal note, it was a pleasure to be involved from start to finish, and hopefully it will contribute to making life easier for email designers and Outlook users alike.

Update: 17 July A few clever people have taken the mosaic to a whole new level creating zoomable versions you can easily move around in.

The first is an AJAX-based version from Kyle Mulka.
Here's a fullscreen version using Deep Zoom from LobsterPot Solutions (requires Microsoft Silverlight). Make sure you zoom in about the "l" in fixoutlook to see a special message.
The last one is also full screen and a slick combination of Deep Zoom on Colaab and also requires SilverLight.

It's interesting to note that all 3 of these projects were built with Microsoft technology.

Posted in: Observations & Answers

47 Comments

Cory Micek
July 14, 2009 6:00pm

epic
Dan Grossman
July 14, 2009 6:00pm

Can I order a printed copy from you to put on the wall? :D
David Greiner
July 14, 2009 6:10pm

Thanks guys, we’re getting one framed for the office right now. We’d love to fire a copy off to anyone who asked, unfortunately digital printing and postage costs make it a little tricky.
Matt Fenton
July 14, 2009 6:11pm

A nice touch mailing it to Redmond!
Kirk Beard
July 14, 2009 6:12pm

That is an awesome response to Microsoft’s claim there is no “industry consensus”!

Now, we just have to hope they listen to us…
Damien Buckley
July 14, 2009 6:27pm

Dude, thats AWESOME lol
Dimitris Rakopoulos
July 14, 2009 8:23pm

Great, guys!
Brad Haynes
July 14, 2009 10:17pm

Now hold up! I never gave my release ;)
christy kilgore
July 14, 2009 11:31pm

I like to picture this in a giant easel frame on William Kennedy’s nightstand.
Tom Morris
July 15, 2009 12:45am

When the fixoutlook campaign started, I made some negative comments about it on my Twitter stream (which consisted of a snarky comment that the way to fix outlook is to uninstall it, and a serious comment, namely that e-mail should be plain text only, and that I am tempted to filter all the HTML e-mail I get because it consists only of a mixture of pointless marketing shit and idiots who want to send me crap in yellow 72pt Comic Sans). Sadly, your software has decided that just by using the string “fixoutlook” in one of my tweets, I support the campaign. I do not.

Just because someone uses the string “fixoutlook” in a tweet does not mean they endorse the fixoutlook campaign, any more than if they use the string “spam” in a tweet do they consent to spam. It would be dishonest if, say, President Bush were to look at all the people who have tweeted the word “Bush” in the last few years as people who support him. I didn’t consent to you using my avatar to suggest that I support your campaign.

E-mail already has “standards” - that standard is text/plain. So long as Outlook can read text/plain, it is conforming to the current e-mail standards. It’d be nice if Outlook would also send text/plain by default and if the Outlook ecosystem didn’t clutter up messages with HTML crud or pointless “Checked for viruses” signatures (why should I care about your anti-virus software?) and so on. Fixing Outlook would be de-HTML-ifying incoming e-mail and showing it as text/plain.
Jason De Santis
July 15, 2009 4:14am

I too wouldn’t mind having a copy of this for my desk! :)
Mike McDerment
July 15, 2009 4:39am

I’m with Cory - this was “epic”.

Well done guys.
MWH
July 15, 2009 6:05am

Firstly I agree with this campaign completely, IE should render HTML emails or ideally the default browser shown in-line.

However one problem I can see with the wish to have IE render HTML emails, is the now poor relation - the Europeans (which includes UK - not actually Europeans but I will let this slide).

Problem - Microsoft is removing the IE browser from Windows 7 for the European market as an attempt to placate the European Monopoly people (or rabble rouser’s if you like).

Microsoft think the easiest way to stop the rabble rouser’s legal rants about Microsoft’s Monopolistic position and muscling out the other website browser creators is to simply take their toys home. Interesting technique - except for those who will actually be using a modern operating system without an actual web browser.

My points from this are simple;
Emails must be rendered in a web browser
Emails can (if must - but seriously really) in word (hopefully we can still turn this off)
Microsoft - right or wrong has to let the Europeans to have an installed browser
Europeans - UK not actually one of you
European rabbles rouser’s find something else to do - like milking the expenses system

Well done
Tatham Oddie
July 15, 2009 8:03am

@ MWH - As I describe at the end of my post (http://blog.tatham.oddie.com.au/2009/07/05/whats-wrong-with-outlook), I don’t think the EU anti-trust restrictions are at play here.
Jeff Judge
July 16, 2009 1:05am

Nice work!
Philippe Creux
July 16, 2009 1:15am

Well done. Sending the poster to Redmond is just great. :)
Thomas Duncan
July 16, 2009 1:20am

Epic indeed! I strongly agree, and much gratitude for this effort.
jim
July 16, 2009 1:27am

If it isn’t “fixed”, the next campaign can be to get people to stop using Outlook.

Mr. Morris, all email clients can simply be set to plain text only. It doesn’t work the other way around.
Adam Knowles
July 16, 2009 1:44am

I went to the ‘reply’ on MS’s blog with an open mind. Unfortunately all I saw was a bunch of self-justifying nonsense, with a comment at the end saying no further comments would be published. So if they won’t publish what my response to their post, maybe CM wil:

“Is ‘Outblog’ a robot of some kind? It creates cold, brutally professional, not-actually-saying-anything messages carefully crafted not to cause any offense to anyone, that don’t provide any information either.

You know you’re wrong to use Word for rendering. But you’re too proud to admit a technical design error that makes you out of sync with the eCRM community and too attached to let the code already written be thrown away. Have some courage and do the right thing.

I fear however that MS and Outlook, despite the promise to ‘note’ my ‘perspective’, are more than big enough to utterly ignore the points made and carry on regardless.

Disappointing, but predictable.”
dms
July 16, 2009 1:54am

@ Tom - the internet was never meant to be what it is today either. These things are called “advances” — if nobody truly wanted HTML emails, they wouldn’t exist. Developers, marketers, and forward-thinkers would have come up with something else instead. And spam is spam, whether it comes in plain text or HTML. I still have to manage an email. The only emails I get are the ones I sign up to receive. Back in the day, I would get very obscene porn spam in my Inbox, and could never do anything about it. I certainly wasn’t going to click the “unsubscribe” link. But spam laws/regulations have really made a difference since then. I don’t get any spam. At all. And I’m all over the ‘net. I think that people who are inundated with spam these days have pretty much asked for it with their careless, ignorant online habits. Is it too much to ask that people actually read about what they’re signing up for when they put their email address in the little box?

Removing the tired “plain text vs HTML” argument from the equation completely, we’re still left with the principle of the matter. Microsoft repeatedly goes against the grain. It seems whatever everyone else is doing — and what they’re doing actually works — Microsoft feels the need to go and do the opposite. I just had an email bomb on me in 2007. My line-height declarations were ignored…no, wait. That’s not accurate. They weren’t ignored. They were “opposite-ified.” I set line height on an 18px font to 19px and the space that was rendered when Word got its grubby little mitts on it was at least 45px. Need I point out here that Outlook 2007 was the only email client that rendered it that way. Every other client had predictable results, rendering it just as it was designed. Even Outlook 2003 did an OK job.

And as for this utopian plain text world that some envision: I think MS would find some way to muck up the rendering of a plain text email, too.
StickyPages
July 16, 2009 2:01am

Wonderfully done my friends!
*Three big cheers*
Jonathan
July 16, 2009 2:05am

Great work guys…...pat yourselves on the back…
Jake
July 16, 2009 2:07am

Tom,

In every other form of written document I produce, I can use things like emphasis, font, text-size, colour, underline, itallics, etc. to lay out a page.

Such forms of page layout are not new things - they’ve been around in written form for thousands of years.

I just don’t get why you feel I shouldn’t be able to in e-mails. I really don’t see what’s so bad about it.

Regards,
Jake.
Andy Ford
July 16, 2009 2:10am

Thank you for fighting this fight. We can only hope that our 25000 voices will be heard. Heard correctly and actually taken seriously.
Marcus
July 16, 2009 2:12am

Tom, If you say that text/html has no place in email from a technical standpoint, then you’re really rejecting MIME as a whole. If you don’t like text/html, you also don’t want attachments, varying character sets, threading, DSNs, and for that matter text/plain - there is no concept of that without MIME. If your mail client corrupted zip attachments you’d be whining about it, so why do you consider text/html to be any different? It’s just data that we’d like handled properly - remember that MS is deliberately going out of its way to mishandle something that many other developers get right, and I have no idea why you’d think that is a good thing.
You’re right in one respect though - Outlook provides a particularly bad UX - even if you provide a plain text alternative, there’s no way of making Outlook display it in preference to an HTML version. Decent mail apps do.
MAGNUM Creative
July 16, 2009 2:19am

Well done!!
~ Fingers crossed.
Luis Abarca
July 16, 2009 2:51am

I want to a copy for my wall :D

Vendanme una copia para pegarla en la pared de mi cuarto
Oskar
July 16, 2009 2:58am

Microsoft = EPIC FAIL
give@shit.com
July 16, 2009 3:51am

tom morris >>> dude you need to get out more… LOL ... you MUPPET.
Boris Mahovac R.G.D.
July 16, 2009 4:19am

I’m sure it’s not going to make a difference with MS even if we had 50K tweets, but it’s great to be part of this—I’m downloading the big file now!
Juan
July 16, 2009 5:10am

Great work by all! Thanks to all those involved, hopefully Microsoft will listen to our petition and fix the problem.

*crosses fingers*
Alon
July 16, 2009 7:22am

Very nice, let’s hope it works.
g
July 16, 2009 12:22pm

@Dan Grossman - just download the file and take it to your local large-format printer.
@pc0
July 16, 2009 1:42pm

Absolutely golden. Idea to execution. This one will live on. Thanks.
James
July 16, 2009 2:01pm

Looks like a terrorist watch-list, and I want to be a part of it! :-)
Kyle Mulka
July 16, 2009 3:45pm

No need to download the whole image! Here’s a zoomable version of the image using Microsoft’s SeaDragon AJAX (and Seadragon Mobile on iPhone)
http://dzify.com/fixoutlook
David Greiner
July 16, 2009 5:05pm

That’s awesome Kyle, great job!
Leon Poole
July 16, 2009 9:49pm

Well done guys! Looks great and certainly does tie off the campaign nicely :)
Storm Ideas
July 17, 2009 1:38am

A fantastic DeepZoom version here using the Colaab app. As RT’d by Email Standards Project themselves!
http://bit.ly/2gktVL

Amazing campaign!
Nick Whitmoyer
July 17, 2009 3:52am

Nice job guys and thank you so much for caring!
Maya Reinshagen
July 17, 2009 12:43pm

Great idea! I’m very proud to be part of it. I’d like to use it as a desktop picture. Any possibility to realize that?
Richard Branson
July 23, 2009 9:08am

I love this campaign just a shame I only found out about it after it was over through CM excellent newsletter. I printed out a big copy and expanded a portion and stuck it on the wall at work, everyone loves it. Ta CM for making my day when I saw it.

MS need to pull their finger out and keep up with the times, if us small businesses can they should too. Thank goodness for opensource and creative people.
pcnw
August 1, 2009 9:44pm

amazing!
Frederick Weiss
August 6, 2009 12:45am

I design a lot of email templates and I HATE outlook for these reasons!
I don’t see why this can not be fixed in 2010.
hermes birin
August 23, 2009 5:08am

I think it’s really positive to see that Microsoft have responded back!

And thanks for a really great campaign!
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Alex
October 5, 2009 9:09pm

Hello,
After 3 months, do we have any other update?

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