So lately at my day job, I have been recruited by the marketing dude to construct some HTML emails for him to mail around to prospects and clients. That’s right, folks. I am a spammer. I don’t feel weird about it – it’s work, and work is work – at least to a certain degree.
What I have discovered though, is that a huge portion of our clients and prospects use Outlook 2007 as their primary email server, and there are some serious problems with this. First of all, in their infinite wisdom and genius, Microsoft has decided to use Word 2007 as it’s HTML rendering engine for Outlook. Why they decided to do this is just simply beyond me, and beyond the scope of this blog – but there is no shortage of other bloggers ranting about this in the “blogosphere.” Just google the phrase “Outlook 2007 HTML emails” and see what you get . They published a list of supported and unsupported elements, attributes and properties and when I finally found it, it blew my freakin’ mind! Bad news for anyone building HTML emails…check it out for yourself :
That’s quite a hefty list. In fact, almost all of the really useful CSS has been stripped out completely. I wanted to shoot myself in the face after writing all that inline style and tr’s and td’s…
Word has always been the LAST choice of HTML editing for me (I use notepad, of all things), and it really should be the last choice for any person serious about creating standards compliant pages that can be sent through email.
In my struggle to re-think things in terms of in-line style and tables galore, I have found some good resource materials for getting the rules wrong on purpose, in case anyone is interested.
Firstly, there’s the acid test…this doesn’t have anything to do with HTML emails, but it will make you wise up and add more wood under the effigy of Microsoft hoping for a hotter fire. Go ahead- test all of your browsers. MSoft has made much to-do about the enhanced support and compliance with IE7, but it’s still unbelieveably bad! I’d say “why didn’t they just use IE to render their HTML for Office products, like they did in the past?” But after seeing this, I have decided it would be the lesser of two evils at best. Must have something to do with that anti-trust lawsuit. Here’s a link to the acid test:
Slightly more useful is this tool, which will give you a “spam score” for your HTML emails. It lists the most common flags for detecting spam, and gives you a pretty easy to understand rating, complete with suggetions for clearing up some of the more obvious problems which may be easily overlooked.
Tags: css, html emails, microsoft rant, office, outlook 2007, standards compliancy, why?
