Outlook 2007: Pushing E-Mail Ahead -10 Years

Microsoft has been getting a lot of flack lately over some of its products. There's the Zune, whose DRM makes sharing music (its big selling point) a pain in the neck, and sometimes impossible. Then there's Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's big chance to jump ahead of the competition (read: Mozilla Firefox), which was received to lukewarm response by the web browsing community. But I don't think any of us expected Outlook to hit that list, or to hit as hard as it just did.

I never had a big problem with Outlook (although I do use Mozilla Thunderbird). Sure, its security was lacking, but that is to be expected from just about any Microsoft product with internet access. But Microsoft has decided that Outlook 2007 will be switching to the Word rendering engine for HTML e-mail. At first, this may not be a big shocker; after all, we've all be using Word for years without any difficulty. What does this mean for us?

Up to now, Outlook has used the Internet Explorer HTML rendering engine. Now that Microsoft has released the new IE 7 with all its new features, Microsoft has decided to switch engines for “in the interest of security”. (Utter) Unfortunately, the CSS support in Word is — to put it mildly — terrible. This means that “e-mails that use certain advanced HTML and CSS features will be somewhat degraded in appearance in Outlook 2007”, although advanced seems to be a relative term. ("Outlook") Check out this article for a comparison of one HTML e-mail in Outlooks Express and 2007. Kevin Yank, web developer and author of several books on web development, wrote,

Not only that, but this new rendering engine isn't any better than that which Outlook previously used — indeed, it's far worse. With this release, Outlook drops from being one of the best clients for HTML email support to the level of Lotus Notes and Eudora, which, in the words of Campaign Monitor's David Grenier, “are serial killers making our email design lives hell.”

Here's a nice list of the CSS short-comings in the Outlook/Word 2007 rendering engine from that same article:

• no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
• no support for forms
• no support for Flash, or other plugins
• no support for CSS floats
• no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
• no support for CSS positioning
• no support for animated GIFs

These are all basic functions — things HTML and CSS have been doing for years; not only that, they are pretty much expected by developers.

The best part is that Microsoft is now trying to defend their decision. Among their reasons are that “customers ‘wanted the richness of the editing experience they were used to from Word integrated throughout Outlook. While Internet Explorer 7.0 is great, it was never intended to be an editing tool.’” ("M-Dollar") Also, Outlook e-mail apparently needed a uniform appearance and greater security. Wait a minute, wasn't IE 7 (the ex-rendering engine) supposed to be the most secure IE yet?

No matter what Microsoft can dream up to justify the switch, it's not going to satisfy the writers of HTML e-mails, who will now have to work harder to make sure their e-mails are sufficiently simple to be viewable in Outlook 2007. Shouldn't support for CSS and HTML should be improving, not jumping backwards at Microsoft's whim?

Works Cited

"Internet Explorer 7". CNET. 2007. 8 Feb 2007. <http://reviews.cnet.com/Internet_Explorer_7/4505-3514_7-32111537.html>

Reimer, Jeremy. "M-Dollar: Microsoft defends lackluster CSS in Outlook". ARS Technica. 2 Feb 2007. 8 Feb 2007. <http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/2/6873>

Reimer, Jeremy. "Outlook 2007 change sends HTML email back to the future, for better and worse". ARS Technica. 15 Jan 2007. 8 Feb 2007. <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8619.html>

Utter, David. "Kiss Your CSS Goodbye With Outlook 2007". Web Pro News. 12 Jan 2007. 8 Feb 2007. <http://.../wpn-49-20070112KissYourCSSGoodbyeWithOutlook2007.html>

Yank, Kevin. "Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007". SitePoint. 12 Jan 2007. 8 Feb 2007. <http://.../microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/>

"Zune". Wikipedia. 2007. 8 Feb 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune>