Microsoft Plans for Email Rendering Sparks Dim Outlook for 2010

Outlook 2010 and Email Rendering – it is a hot topic in the email marketing community at the moment. Thousands of email marketing professionals are posting, twittering and emailing about their concerns for Microsoft’s plans Word to render the HTML for Outlook email messages in 2010.

So what exactly is the issue here?

There are lots of technical reasons but I will attempt to simplify the issues and the history leading up to the current debate.

The way Microsoft renders an email is different than the way the most popular, accessible and published standards tell the rest of us how to render email. This in turn has the effect that emails sent from someone with Microsoft Outlook to someone with Microsoft Outlook looks fine, but tends to look terrible if someone sending or receiving that email is using any other kind of email program than Microsoft.

Why?

Well, on one hand Microsoft is using HTML layout codes that were supposed to stop being used many years ago. On the other hand, they are using HTML layout codes that only Microsoft uses.  This means that there will virtually be no way to ensure that your email campaign will look or function correctly for your subscribers.

So how can this be fixed?

This is totally in Microsoft’s court to fix, though they essentially claim that it is an issue of their program being so good it does not work for the rest of us. (To me, this implies that we should all just stop complaining and buy Microsoft)

What they need to do is make sure Outlook renders email in the same way the vast majority of the rest of the world renders email so it works the same for everybody. They can do it – they seem to pretty handy with software programs and if they need help they can always call on the expert help of The eMail Guide’s directory members.

You can help by visiting http://fixoutlook.org/ and adding your voice to the concerned community.

Screen Shot of the Twitter-based campaign to fix Oulook