Outlook 2010 and HTML Email
For those of you who build HTML emails for your clients on a regular basis, I am sure you are aware of the grass-roots effort over at fixoutlook.org to influence Outlook 2010. For those who don’t know, Microsoft introduced a change when they launched Outlook 2007 to the way emails were rendered. As of Outlook 2007, Outlook opens the HTML Email and converts it to Microsoft Word format before displaying it to the user. What happens during this process is that many CSS attributes and HTML support is completely removed. Some of the most notable absences are background-image, and padding and margin support. A more detailed look at its deficiencies is available.
Through testing an early beta of Outlook 2010, the folks over at Campaign Monitor discovered that Outlook 2010 continued to render email the same way as Outlook 2007. This prompted them to launch fixoutlook.org so Microsoft could hear the voice of developers and users around the world who say “Enough is Enough!” Less than a full day after the site launched, Microsoft issued a release on their Outlook blog.
Microsoft’s response was largely smoke and mirrors and they went as far as to claim security as a benefit for using Word to render emails (A feature they say isn’t available in browsers). I am sorry to say, Microsoft, that pretty much every browser out there lets you turn off Javascript now if you really want to… so the fact that Word can’t process Javascript is not a security feature.
I was able to reach David Greiner, co-founder of Campaign Monitor, last night for a statement. We had a great call and he was extremely gracious concerning Microsoft’s response. He mentioned that Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world with the biggest product in the world… we have to be understanding of what they are working with. He also mentioned that he has personally dialoged with some of the Outlook team and said they are a great group of people. His reasoning on Outlook’s deficiencies was simple: “HTML Email, whether you like it or hate it, is not going anywhere. Its broken, so why not fix it.”
David did express that he was slightly hurt by Microsoft’s response but he gathered hope from their claim to support email standards should a true standard emerge. Toward the end of the call David also mentioned that since a standard for HTML already exists, email clients should just support the existing standard… it is HTML Email after all!
For more information, I encourage you to visit the following sites:
- FixOutlook.org – The site that started it all
- Microsoft’s Response
- Jeffery Zeldman’s Response
- Campaign Monitor’s Response
- Email Standard Project
Be sure to subscribe the feed over at the Email Standards Project for the latest in email news.
Feedback! Be sure to leave comments on this post! I want to hear your thoughts on the subject. Is Microsoft right or wrong? Is FixOutlook.org worth getting involved with?
Disclaimer: I am a current customer of Campaign Monitor… and I happen to respect the team over there quite a bit.
Doug Neiner is an Editor at Fuel Your Coding and an official member of the jQuery Team. He is addicted to new technology, and specifically loves spending time with WordPress, Ruby on Rails and jQuery. Learn more via twitter or his Google Profile.
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One of my favorite quotes by a Microsoft employee is from one of their reps that spoke at a conference in NYC last year – he said (verbatim): “So, I know a lot of you don’t like us. We know we suck… but we’re trying to get better.” Are they?
It’s hard to say. Ultimately, there is no short-term solution – at least, not a feasible one. Microsoft will continue to treat its products and the market the same way it always has: by relying on the masses of its technically-unsavvy end users to support whatever “Microsoft standard” it feels it should be enforcing. To be fair, none of this really matters for most of their products.
They’re really not the only evil, though: every major browser rendering engine has a different interpretation (however minor or major) of standards. In any case, I think that FixOutlook.org is really just a glimpse at a much larger, more abstract issue. I don’t particularly think that Microsoft will respect the view of a small developer audience (compared to its end users in general) unless they start catching major heat (eg more than angry bloggers and small organizations), but I do think it’s worth voicing, especially if it helps you sleep at night.
One of the most embarrassing moves from Microsoft this year. Plenty more to follow!
I can understand the fact that Microsoft is the largest software company in the world and that they have to make changes more gradual than other small companies, but what I don’t sympathize with is their continued support and development of products (and standards) that are less than stellar. (I use that term loosely.)
I think it’s easy to associate any/all Microsoft employees with the company itself, thereby assuming they’re all bent on the destruction of good design and development. But I think it’s safe to say that there are some good people there that want to make a difference. I haven’t met any of them personally, but from the post above it looks like David Greiner has talked with a few.
In my personal opinion, I would’ve liked to seen the FixOutlook.org site really make a difference in Microsoft’s stance. It’s just downright ugly to see MS Word as an HTML rendering system. *UGH* And to think that they better supported CSS 9-10 years ago is a huge laugh. I’m not sure what they were thinking on that one. So my final answer, yes, Microsoft is wrong for still planning to use MS Word for HTML emails. Period.
My favorite part was that Microsoft’s own marketing campaigns are thwarted due to their own crappy product. The post below says it all.
“Tim Dawson said:
“[click here to] Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007.”
- Quoted from the official Microsoft Xbox newsletter.
Even your companies own marketing teams cant send out appealing newsletters using the tools you are providing. “
What a shame. Back to tables.
Well I’ve been trying to demonstrate to a client the simple (cough cough cough) method of embeding html image icons like facebook an tweeter to the bottom of their emails with a border.
Since I can wip something up in seconds in dreamweaver I quickly made up a simple but nice html signature ready to insert into outlook.
2 hours later…. After reading all the useless threats of “How Tos” insert html into outlook 2010 I realised that no-one really knows how, yet they do post methods that just dont exist.
Over the last 2 years Microsoft have really got on my nerves with the nonsense they release. Its like showing a kid a new toy with pretty pictures and amazing glowing things, then they pick it up and it breaks within minutes… This is the new Microsoft…
Its time this useless company move out of the way and let a real team of developers and strategic researchers prove that we are advanced in technology !
This constant upgrade of desktop images over functionality has got to stop….
I found a solution to the Outlook 2010 signature thing. As it turns out you can use a Dreamweaver-created / HTML signature in Outlook 2010. On your hard drive (mine = windows XP) Outlook 2010 stores the signature in HTML form.
What you do is create a blank one in Outlook 2010 and save it. Then find it on the hard drive, take your nice pretty one and rename it to the same thing as this Outlook one, then replace the Outlook signature file.on the hard drive. I can get into it more but I was equally frustrated at Outlook 2010 and this whole signature nonsense. On the old Outlook all you had to do was brows the hard drive for your signature file. The new one is complicated.
THERE IS A SOLUTION!
I spent about an hour looking up ways that I can take my wonderful HTML code from Dreamweaver and paste it into a new message in Outlook 2010. As I found out over and over and over and over, there is no way to do so. Then a co-worker of mine who does not know coding from a whole-in-the-wall asked what about the old Outlook?
She was right! My office recently upgraded to Office / Outlook 2010 HOWEVER luckily the one SMART thing Microsoft did was they never remove the old Outlook in the upgrade process. I suppose they did this because of the whole archiving thing. Any smart person knows that you never delete any email message, even the spam ones. You should always keep EVERYTHING as evidence even if it’s utter junk email. Keeping the old Outlook does come in handy if you need to go back to old archives. Obviously when I upgraded to Outlook 2010 I disabled the email accounts in the old Outlook.
Anywase… back to the solution:
1. In the old Outlook (mine was 2004) disable all the auto send/receive options so that you only send an email message when you want and not automatically when you hit “Send”
2. Disable the provision where the Old Outlook will check for messages automatically every certain amount of minutes. Make sure the old Outlook NEVER checks for messages automatically.
3. Re-establish your email account onto the old Outlook
4. Copy your HTML code (for me it was from Dreamweaver)
5. Create a new email message in the Old Outlook and switch to the SOURCE tab
6. Paste your HTML code into the message
7. Send the email! If it’s a newsletter you’ll have to also get the address book but that’s another issue altogether.
In conclusion I never use the old Outlook other than to send these HTML emails but it works. Shame on Microsoft for taking something that was so user-friendly and messing it up. Would it be so hard to allow us to copy/paste out HTML into Outlook 2010???
Hi. I have a VERY simple solution to the problem. The fact that I am not an IT expert probably helped me to find something really simple…
1) Create your nice html signature file with any html editor.
2) Save it as something.html, then open the same file with MS Word
3) Within Outlook 2010, create a new signature with some name and leave the window open.
4) Go back to Word, where your signature is being displayed, copy and then paste it into the signature editing box in Outlook.
That’s it! It worked for me (Windows 7 64 bit + Outlook 2010)….
Hey Claudio,
That works perfectly! I’ve been searching for an answer for at least and hour and your method worked the first time I tried it.
Thank you very much!
Have you see Outlook 2010 x64 rendering? Random to say the least, font-sizing is out, the style element causes major issues. Then you click forward, the rendering engine changes and fixes itself. Well apart from the weird OL issue I’m having, font, size and color lost on first digit.
I can see things getting worse.
Making every email program HTML compatible only makes sense. So, let us unite and force microsoft to comply to the standard.
It would seem that Microsoft doesn’t really care – or they’re thinking we don’t really worry about all of you developers who are spending (wasting) hours of time fixing emails so they run on Outlook 2007 for clients. Hey, we’re Microsoft and we call the shots. Who would like to set up a site where we can log our hours that we spend working on MS bugs (remember all of the IE 6 bugs that we had to fix and charge clients for)??
Word for HTML rendering? Absurd. That’s like having a bag of dog poop used to hold down your table cloth for a picnic on a windy day.
Ah Google Apps sound so good; hopefully, we’ll see MS go away someday or whittle down to a has been in the world of IT. Listen to your customers. Listen to your users. Hey, just for fun, go to the MS site that describes the incompatibilities of Outlook 2007 – read the comments from developers. And, not much from MS in terms of – we’ll fix it. We hear you. We love our customer. Not. They love your money.
Dont know about you guys but i use a service. my clients wont wait for me for fixes and stuff wasting time. check this site so far there are the best in all email client fixes.bugs and so on
thing is with outlook is always an issue. and then if you fix in outlook it will break in gmail and so on
here is the site
http://www.htmlforemail.com
Hey CC I use http://www.htmlforemail.com too. fastest people out there. Did you see the latest email marketing tools? I think i ll use them for their salemailer.com instead of mailchimp. prices are really competetive. did you use the email marketing from their site yet
?
My solution…don’t use Outlook. There are a number of email solutions out there, even for novices like me, including Constant Contact. I only use Microsoft products for the basics, and then only because 90% of the business computing world uses it.
As I read through the comments above, I’m wondering if HTML and WordAsEditor could be the problem with why a message to a specific recipient (created in DreamWeaver and sent via MailChimp) is incorrectly formatted when forwarded to other contacts.
The newsletter is three columns with a header and footer. Simple design with images and hyperlinks. Received just fine by the individual but “squishy” when forwarded on.
I appreciate anyone’s assistance or comment.