The StyleSheet - For businesses that use the internet

Sending E-mail Newsletters? Beware of Outlook 2007

Posted March 1, 2007 By Nick Weynand |

If you haven’t upgraded to Office 2007 yet, you probably haven’t noticed how bad most e-mail newsletters are looking these days. We spent about five hours last week recoding The StyleSheet just to get it looking right in Microsoft’s new e-mail client.

So what are some of the issues in Outlook 2007?

Beneath it all is Microsoft’s choice of HTML rendering engine for this new version. Outlook 2003 used Internet Explorer’s HTML rendering engine. Not the best platform to build on, but better than Word’s outdated rendering engine, which is what the new version of Outlook uses.

Just so you can see the difference, take a look at the January edition of The StyleSheet in both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. Click the image for a larger version.

Outlook 2003 Outlook 2007

Why did Microsoft do this? They claim it helps with security and consistency, but most people aren’t buying it.

What’s done is done and we can’t sit around and worry about it too long. It’s time to start checking your e-mail newsletters in Outlook 2007 and addressing the issues that come up.

Testing Your E-Newsletter

The best way to test your e-newsletter is to upgrade to Office 2007 or find someone that has. This may not be feasible for you, or you may not want to upgrade just yet. In this case, there are several good email testing programs out there. One that has received a lot of press is SiteVista (http://www.sitevista.com). The cost for this service is $19 for one day of use, plenty long enough for you to decide if your e-newsletter needs some adjusting. In addition, SiteVista will test your e-newsletter across many popular email clients, not just Outlook 2007.

As a friendly gesture, I’ll offer to check your e-newsletter for you. Just send it to me at nick@trademarkmedia.com and I’ll reply with a screenshot of what it looks like in Outlook 2007.

If your e-newsletter has been wrecked by the new version of Outlook, what should you do? If you’re a developer, get to coding. Microsoft recently released a pretty comprehensive list of what is and is not supported. You can find it at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx. If you’re not a developer (like most people reading this), it’s best to ask the person who originally coded your e-newsletter to take over. They can probably get your email template looking great in Outlook 2007 in less than a couple of hours.

How important is this?

The new Office Suite only came out a couple of months ago, so Outlook 2007 usage is still pretty limited (I tried to find some statistics to no avail). However, its adoption rate will grow over the next year so I recommend checking and recoding your e-newsletters within the next couple of months.

If you do it right, you can get your e-newsletter looking great in the new version of Outlook along with all of the major mail clients, even if it does feel like you’re taking a step backward.

Suggested Reading (there’s plenty of it on this topic)

[1] “Microsoft takes email design back 5 years”
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/microsoft_takes_email_design_b.html
[2] “The truth behind the Outlook 2007 change and what you can do about it”
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/the_truth_behind_the_outlook_2.html
[3] “Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007”
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/
[4] “Outlook 2007 HTML change, users complain”
http://www.techspot.com/news/24236-outlook-2007-html-change-users-complain.html

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