Over the last few weeks various brands have decided it’s a good idea to fill my inbox with irrelevant junk which tries to work on the back of the World Cup. The problem with this is many of the links are extremely tenuous – ‘England are out so treat yourself to something nice’ has been the constant theme this week. It’s so predictable I know the email is coming before I receive it.

No value is  added to the email by mentioning the World Cup, it just seems marketers think that this  cuts through the clutter and empathises with their customer base. It doesn’t – it just adds to the clutter of all those other brands and their tenuous World Cup links. It all just reminds me of a politician claiming to like the coolest band of the moment in case it improves their street cred.

Just like I don’t want our politicians spouting on about their hip music collection I don’t want my favourite clothing retailers talking to me about football – that’s why the BBC Sport website and talkSPORT radio exist.

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The newest member of the Emailcenter team (Simon) talks about the main issues to consider when trying to get your marketing emails to render correctly in Outlook 2007.

The launch of the Microsoft Office 2010 is pencilled for next year (surprising to see the dates matching!) and the first release for testing – the Technical Preview, which is invite-only – has been released.

This has generated a fair bit of talk between email designers, due to the notorious perceived failings of Outlook 2007′s HTML rendering, and whether this will be continued in Outlook 2010. There has even been a bit of a storm whipped up on Twitter, due to the aim of fixoutlook.org to send a rather loud message to the chaps at Microsoft.

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