Designing rich newsletters for Notes has always been a pain. The Notes html rendering engine pretty much sucks. But as not many consumers use Notes it didn’t really matter. Also, webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail has been difficult to negotiate CSS wise. But you could always trust the good old Outlook to render your html e-mail in the right way.
Until now, that is.
February Microsoft launches Outlook 2007 featuring that old buggy Word rendering engine with extremely limited support for CSS. Yes: The one you know from MS Word that has the same html rendering power as did Netscape 2 – that is: Very limited indeed.
It’s nothing short of a disaster. Html formatted e-mail newsletters drive a lot of our clients’ online business, and we know for a fact that rich formatted newsletters work well: Nice design makes people buy stuff. Now some of our clients must either redesign their newsletters or fall back to text e-mail to be sure their customers can read their messages in Outlook (which most people use).
Why Microsoft has chosen to use the crippled Word rendering engine for displaying the html formatting of the brand new Outlook 2007 is a mystery.
My best guess, though, is that some fool in Microsoft has decided that to “integrate” e-mail more into the Office suite the stupid Word engine must be used all over the place. And it’s probably the same lame guy that years ago decided that Word should be the default e-mail editor for Outlook.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Klaus,
I don’t think the information you are quoting is correct. But I do not know. All I know is that the HTML newsletters I get render fine in Outlook 2007. If you want to see what your HTML emails will look like in Outlook 2007, feel free to send some samples to my Microsoft account and I will take screenshots for you and send them back. If you do not remember my microsoft account, send a mail to my itu account and I will send it to you.
Thanks,
Christian Hagel
Hi Christian,
nice to hear from you. I guess the reason why your newsletters are rendering ok is that most people still use old fashioned html 4.01 (or lower) for newsletters. This will render (if tweaked a bit) fine in the Word rendering engine. But we should be moving towards xhtml and CSS2, and that won’t work in the new Outlook – as far as I’m told by the real xhtml geeks.
I’ll try to find some examples for you.