[BNM] html email woes: Die Outlook die.

[Adam Wright]

MS, in their infinite wisdom, replaced IE as the renderer for HTML 
e-mails in Outlook 2007; as the replacement, they chose the engine from 
MS Word. Not, in my opinion, the best of choices.

The articles at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx 
indicate the level of standards support - frankly, you'll probably have 
a fun uphill struggle to cater for this limited subset of the market. 
I'd probably ship it "as is", including a plain-text MIME part and a 
link to an online HTML version (good practice in all cases. Office 2007 
could be considered for the next redesign.

adamw

shaun.numb at gmail.com wrote:
> I'm working for the fine Richard Maynard of Wessex Networks, trying  
> to create an email broadcast/newsletter. Anyone who's done one of  
> these things knows that they should be old-school table based... no  
> probs. BUT Look at my beautiful news letter in Firefox or IE here:  
> http://www.wessexnetworks.com/newsletter_issues/issue13/
> 
> Now compare this to the screen grab of how my beauty renders in  
> Outlook 2007:  http://www.wessexnetworks.com/newsletter_issues/ 
> issue13/outlook_2007.jpg
> 
> MU%&A F*&@ER!
> 
> I really am in danger of electrocuting myself  (tears of frustration  
> pouring into the keyboard of my Mac Book Pro)
> 
> I know the tables could be neater and all, but is it really worth  
> trying to tidy it up? Will Outlook 2007 ever display something  
> acceptable? Would you suggest a plain-text news letter with a link to  
> the actual page online? (I know it's a crap solution but) perhaps  
> cheat and just have the whole thing as an image which when clicked  
> links through to the online version.
> 
> Thanks
> Shaun