Outlook 2007 and HTML Emails

If you use Outlook 2007 you may have noticed that HTML emails don't always display as you've seen them in other email clients or as you'd expected them to display.

The reason for this is that the rendering engine in Outlook 2007 is the one from Word 2007 which a) isn't fully standards compliant and b) is limited in it's CSS and HTML support. Quite why Microsoft chose this route is a mystery, given their definite move towards standards with Expression Web.

Microsoft themselves have produced an add-in schema for EW V1 that will enable you to validate a page for Outlook 2007 compatibility. Unfortunately this doesn't work with EW V2. See the link below for download details and instructions.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx

For further information on the limitations see this article from SitePoint:

http://tinyurl.com/y5fxq5

 

Email Standards Project

If you are particularly interested in HTML emails see the Email Standards Project which is campaigning to resolve the differences the exist between email clients in their HTML support. It's like going back five years with browser standards!

 

Additional Resources

The following articles on SitePoint are worth reading.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/principles-beautiful-html-email

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters