Email rendering in Outlook not getting fixed in Office 2010

HTML emails are a great way for businesses to stay in contact with their customers - they look great, get results, and are cheap and easy to send. However, with the release of Office 2007, coding HTML emails took a major step backwards.

See, Microsoft decided to use Word as the rendering engine for email in Outlook. Word is word processing software, not a web browser; it doesn't interpret HTML code the same way Internet Explorer would. As a result email designers are hamstrung in what they can do with emails. They have to design and code for the lowest common denominator, Outlook, and its #$(@# broken display engine.

For businesses to comply with the standards for Outlook compatibility means that they have to produce clunky, image-heavy, inaccessible emails. Content that is in images can be lost when programs block images, leading to ineffective campaigns and wasted time and money.

The email developer community was hopeful that Microsoft was going to fix the email display problem in Office 2010. Despite 22,997 tweets from the Twitter community and hundreds of comments on their blog, the developers at Microsoft have come out and declared that The Outlook Problem will not be fixed in Office 2010.

Booo to Microsoft for ignoring their customers and saying "take a hike" to email developers. Read more about what you can do at the Email Standards Project, or tweet your support of the Fix Outlook project.