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Outlook 2007 causes havoc with HTML emails! Print E-mail
Written by Alex Bremer   
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Outlook 2007 is rubbish?Jack is forever reminding me to "Google" a solution to the various and varied technical problems that we inevitably come up against during our working day, and invariably there comes a time (usually after hours of fruitless labour) when I have to admit defeat and seek assistance from within the numerous forums and articles that litter the Internet.

However, today set a new benchmark; for two days I'd toiled on a newsletter for a client. Hours of tweaking code, checking on numerous browsers, various versions of Outlook (old and new), as well as the Gmail rendering, had left me baffled as to why Outlook 2007 was making such a pig's ear of the newsletter layout. It didn't seem to matter what I did - it looked dreadful.

The issue was background images, and it was only when I threatened to throw my shiny new computer (Vista install and all) out of the window that Jack decided to intervene, and within seconds had dug out the answer to my problems (or at least an explanation) within the article below.

The upshot is this: to make sure that our clients' newsletters work beautifully in the future (as more and more people inevitably move over to Outlook 2007) we're going to have to revisit each and every template applying simplified layouts... ho hum...

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/article.php/3662656

On a serious note, I don't really think Outlook 2007 is rubbish at all; I actually love the improvements and the way it looks - I just wish they'd render emails using default browser... or at least IE...


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» 3 Comments
1"What a palava!"
on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 17:48by Jack Bremer - 3B
Further to Alex's words, the problem is with Outlook 2007's programmers taking the lazy option of using Microsoft Word for both generating and rendering HTML email content. 
 
Word is so flawed for HTML, that it not only slows Outlook down (first thing I do when installing Office on any computer is turn off Word for emails!) but it fails to adhere to most Internet code standards, displaying images, nested elements and code terribly! 
 
This is a real shame, and as the article Alex has linked to purports, it sets email newsletters back years!
2"Shipsides"
on Wednesday, 06 August 2008 09:40by Fraser
I agree!
3"Bah! Humbug!"
on Wednesday, 24 September 2008 05:52by Jaryd Fletcher
Microsoft have some kind of insanity going on with their latest set of products. 
 
IE7 has rubbish toolbars, Outlook2007 has the horror of Word rendered HTML and Vista misses the point entirely with added "pretty" instead of "fast"....
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