Dont let Outlook mess up your emails

Added on: Wednesday 24th June 2009

There is a move going on at the moment to try to get Microsoft to remove the Word rendering engine from Outlook 2010. Whats more the campaign is being mounted using Twitter.

Back in Outlook 2003 (I think it was) Microsoft suddenly took a backward step and started using Word's rendering engine to display HTML emails.

All of a sudden many emails that looked perfectly good in earlier versions were totally different and in many cases unusable (as forms didn't render at all).

Although its been a slow journey to get all the major web browsers to support similar standards we are finally getting closer with the release of IE8.

The same can't be said of emails though - we are still using table based layouts and its very much a case of the lowest common denominator when it comes to features.

If you are a web designer or IT Professional you should definitely tell Microsoft to move forward rather than backwards.

But even if you just use email to keep in touch with customers you should also care because ultimately you want your emails to look the same whoever is reading it and you don't want to spend hours and hours testing each one.

Head over to Fix Outlook to voice your disapproval at this move. (NOTE that you will need a twitter account)

The site background shows all the Twitter users who haved 'tweeted' about it and also has an excellent example of how an email looks in Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2010.

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