[BNM] html email woes: Die Outlook die.

[Dan Eastwell]

It's still possible to get it right. There's lots of stuff on
campaignmonitor.com (http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/) and a
useful tool to help you try. There are things to avoid as well, but
not necessarily for Outlook, more for Hotmail (sorry, 'Live') and
Yahoo/Gmail, that strip an awful lot of HTML out.

Don't bother with accessibility, don't bother with stylesheets, don't
bother with re-factoring code afterwards. (You don't know how much it
pains me to say that...!)

As for word as the reading (not just the writing engine as it is in
2003) engine in outlook 2007, you've lost an awful lot, including
background images, etc.

I'm sure you don't need telling to strip your code right back and test
incrementally.

Hope that helps,

Any more q's, let me know.

Dan.

On 6/4/07, Adam Wright <adamw at archgrove.co.uk> wrote:
> 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
> --
>
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-- 
Daniel Eastwell

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