The last company I worked for sends a lot of email blasts to their clients and users of their websites. They range from e-newsletters to client specific emails. For example, several of their websites let user accumulate points. Depending on how many points the user has they can redeem anything from a Chili’s gift card to a Mini Cooper. Once a month we would send a status email. It list’s points redeemed, earned and available. It would also list any current promotions being offered in the program. The emails are usually HTML with a text version included incase HTML is turned off.
Microsoft made some changes to Outlook 2007 that affected how these emails look. Outlook 2007 now uses Word’s HTML engine to render HTML instead of using IE’s engine, which Outlook has always used. A highlight of some of the problems this caused are:
- No support for background images (HTML or CSS)
- No support for forms
- No support for Flash, or other plugins
- No support for CSS floats
- No support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
- No support for CSS positioning
- No support for animated GIFs
Due to these changes I had to redesign several of our HTML emails to support Outlook 2007. It’s seems as if many developers are unaware of this issue and this is something to keep in mind as we design any HTML emails we send. For more information follow the link below.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/microsoft_takes_email_design_b.html
