Will Outlook 2007 Wreck Your E-Mail? What Microsoft Outlook 2007 Does Wrong Brian Livingston
If you switch to Microsoft Outlook 2007 from some earlier Microsoft e-mail program — such as Outlook 2003 or Outlook Express — many of the messages you receive will start looking very weird.
That's because Outlook 2007 no longer uses the HTML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer, which by and large has a very good command of HTML. Instead, Outlook 2007 displays e-mail messages using Word for Windows, which is notorious for its mangling of HTML.
David Greiner, an executive of Campaign Monitor, a company that specializes in making e-mails work correctly in all kinds of programs, wrote recently that Outlook 2007 "takes e-mail design back five years."
Now there's a free resource that shows you exactly how badly Outlook 2007 garbles e-mail messages that look fine in many other e-mail programs.
A Free Guide to How Bad Outlook 2007 Is
First, it's important to point out that the current uproar in the HTML standards community is not about whether people should send e-mails using plain text versus the different fonts and colors that are available with HTML.
Different senders get different results, of course, but most companies that communicate with customers via e-mail find that response rates are better for HTML messages than plain-text messages. An informal survey by e-mail consultant Jeanne Jennings found that responses can be 50 percent higher.
People aren't going to stop using HTML to format e-mail messages any more than they're going to revert to Morse code for communications. When given a choice between receiving messages in pretty HTML formats or drab plain text, consumers overwhelmingly select the HTML option, in almost every case that's been tested.
That's one reason why it's fairly shocking how badly Outlook 2007 supports HTML standards that have been around for a decade or more.
One company that specializes in helping companies troubleshoot their e-mail problems, Pivotal Veracity, is now distributing a free PowerPoint presentation that illustrates Outlook 2007's new weaknesses.
Some of the firm's examples show that e-mail messages that look fine in previous versions of Outlook, even in Microsoft's old Outlook Express, wind up looking in Outlook 2007 like jigsaw pieces that haven't been assembled yet.
What Outlook 2007 Does Wrong
The basic issue is that Word for Windows, unlike Internet Explorer, has poor support for HTML standards. These practices were developed years ago to add simplicity and predictability to Web content. The standards include "styles," also known as CSS or cascading style sheets. Styles make it possible for the creator of an e-mail message to define fonts, colors, and other objects at the beginning of a message, rather than redefining them over and over throughout a message, wasting time and bandwidth.
Some features that Outlook 2007 no longer handles properly are:
• Background colors - Adding a background color can help a designer separate one part of an e-mail from another, making it far more readable. But Outlook 2007 now lacks the ability to display background colors when one element of a message is nested within another.
• Positioning - It's a simple matter to place one element of a message to the left or right of another using standard styles. But Outlook 2007 seems ignorant of such positioning, displaying such a message as a jumbled mess.
• Spacing - Restricted to the capabilities of its Word backend, Outlook 2007 has even lost support for such elementary aspects of a message as the margin and padding around text and other objects.
If you switch to Microsoft Outlook 2007 from some earlier Microsoft e-mail program — such as Outlook 2003 or Outlook Express — many of the messages you receive will start looking very weird.