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Traditionally
it has been easy for designers to get their HTML email rendered
correctly in Outlook, the dominant desktop email client. Unfortunately
this is about to change with the release of Outlook 2007.
Previously
Outlook has always utilised Internet Explorer for rendering
the HTML but now Microsoft have decided to utilise Word for
this purpose.
If
anyone has ever used Word to create a HTML you will know how
limited its capabilities are.
To
see the impact of this on your HTML emails we tested 128 creatives
in Outlook 2007. 28 of these (21.9%) had rendering problems
that otherwise would have not existed in previous versions
of Outlook.
What
HTML does Outlook not support?
On
the whole most common HTML tags are supported hence why 100
creatives rendered perfectly. However background images (background
colours are OK) do not get displayed. This is the most widely
experienced problem with the tested emails.
In
addition the <Margin> tag does not allow you to space
your text from the edge of a table cell.
Emails
that suffered the main issues were heavily reliant on CSS.
While Outlook 2007 supports CSS there are many limitations.
Again
the main issue is the lack of support for background images
defined by CSS.
Linked
CSS style sheets are not supported so make sure you include
all CSS within the HTML.
Formatting
of bullet points in CSS can cause the bullet points to be
forced out of line from each other.
Image
dimensions specified by CSS are not applied by Outlook. Therefore
we saw on a couple of occasions emails being stretched to
the width of the correct image size, not the specified width.
The
other common issue is CSS used for positioning being ignored,
leaving the email a complete mess.
To
help customers overcome these issues we are adding an Outlook
2007 preview in our Inbox Preview feature.
Another
useful resource is the Microsoft
guide to HTML & CSS rendering in Outlook 2007.
Other
issues with Outlook 2007 include:
Phishing – Outlook looks for emails that claim to be
from someone but are in fact from a spammer looking to trick
you into giving confidential details. Outlook will block the
message content including images and links.
Junk
Mail Filter – If the Outlook filter catches your email
as spam it will block the HTML version, just leaving a stripped
plain text version. Another article will focus on the Outlook
2007 spam filter.
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