SubscribeGet your HTML newsletters and emails ready for Outlook 2007
Quick Links
- Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 (Part 1 of 2)
- Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 (Part 2 of 2)
Outlook 2007 is full of new things. Some of them are very obvious, some of them are predominantly “under the hood” and can be easily overlooked by users. A good example for the latter one are many of the IMAP improvements in 2007, which I will discuss in an upcoming blog post. One of the very obvious changes though is the new email editor for Outlook. Gone is the native Outlook editor that didn’t even have the ability to show you spelling errors as you typed (those red squiggles). Gone are also the days when you could use Word as your email editor. In Outlook 2007, you get one built-in editor, that ’s it.And that built-in editor is Word. Well…not really. The Office teams realized that there was no point in maintaining two editors for plain text, HTML and Rich Text: one simple one (Outlook built-in) and one very powerful one (Word). Therefore they decided to not develop the Outlook built-in editor any further, but to use Word for 2007. However, the existing Word integration wasn’t really a great solution either. It required that Word is installed and it seemed to me that it took forever to load Word whenever I wanted to write an email. Therefore, Microsoft packaged a stripped-down version of Word 2007 into a DLL that ships with Outlook 2007. This means, Word 2007 is not required for the Outlook editor to work. With this approach, a user doesn’t even notice that a reduced version of Word is used for writing emails, but the user notices that the editor is significantly better than the 2003 built-in one (e.g. it has those red squiggles).By integrating Word in this way into Outlook, Outlook also is able to use the text and HTML rendering capabilities of Word. This means that all emails, RSS posts and other email-like items are displayed using this special Word DLL. Internet Explorer is hence no longer used by Outlook to display HTML content. This change alone increases email security in Outlook immensely. To further increase security and do as much as only possible to prevent Outlook from becoming a security risk to a user, WordMail supports a specifically designed subset of HTML and CSS. Any HTML or CSS that could be potentially lead to an exploit, is simply not supported at all by Outlook. Naturally, some of the HTML and CSS features that are not supported by Outlook 2007 made that list not due to security features, but due to Microsoft not being able to implement all of them (lots of browsers, e.g. very notably IE6, don’t support HTML and CSS to the full extent either).
This brings me to the actual topic of this post. As Outlook only supports a specific subset of HTML and CSS only, many HTML newsletters and emails will no display as intended in Outlook 2007. Some of the features not supported are:
- Animated GIFs
- HTML forms
- Applets
- Macromedia Flash
- HTML Frames
- CSS floats
Microsoft has published an MSDN Article detailing the HTML and CSS rendering capabilities in Outlook 2007.
In addition, and almost more importantly, Microsoft has made available a validator tool that can determine whether an existing HTML document uses unsupported elements or not. The validator tool can be used with Visual Studio 2005, SharePoint Designer 2007, Expression Web, Dreamweaver MX 2004 or Dreamweaver 8. A second MSDN article provides walk-throughs for using the tool with these programs and also has the link for downloading the tool.
Outlook 2007 will be released soon (=within the next several months). Now is the best time to take a look at all your HTML newsletters and emails and ensure that they will render great in Outlook 2007.
Update: Joe Hardy did a great job pointing out the real sore spots in the HTML/CSS capabilities of Outlook 2007.
October 7th, 2006 at 0:33
[…] My post about the changes in Outlook 2007’s HTML rendering capabilities featured a section titled “Quick Links” on the top. It contained the two links you would want to have handy when you have already read the post and are using it as a reference. […]
November 21st, 2006 at 5:11
[…] Patrick Schmid’s article: Get your HTML newsletters and emails ready for Outlook 2007 […]
January 16th, 2007 at 11:15
The only people who care about Outlook 2007 using Word to render its emails, and the loss of the aforementioned features are designers and developer. Not USERS!
What user said “I wish I got more of those pointless marketing emails!”.
What user said “I could just go a big background picture for my emails!”
What user said “I wish I could trach the open count of my emails!”
Not I…
January 16th, 2007 at 20:18
I do not agree with Martin in so far.
When sending a mail, I’m a* user*.
And he who receives my mail is a user.
OL 2007 seems to have restriction which prevent that some of my mails appear as they should.
Whereas normally I strictly keep to the device of using “plain vanilla ASCII only in text and news” on rare occasions (birthdays and holidays) I sometimes use a background with an embedded image for composing a mail in OE and I embed a sound file which then plays when the mail is opened or preview.
Under OE and OL 2003 these mails appear fine.
Under OL 2007 neither the embedded image is shown, nor is the sound played as it should.
I’m not sure if the new handling of HTML in OL is resposible for this. But it seems so.
In so far I feel this be a deprivation
Rainald
January 18th, 2007 at 3:01
Outlook 2007 should offer four modes:
1. Plain text mode.
2. Rich text mode.
3. HTML lite mode.
4. HTML full mode.
The default could be Plain text mode or HTML lite mode. Us end users should be the ones that decide wether or to risk viewing FULL HTML email messages.
January 27th, 2007 at 10:29
Maybe this will help:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Decent_HTML_in_Outlook_2007/
It’s al long shot, I know…
January 27th, 2007 at 12:34
Chris,
I have been using Outlook 2007 since November 2005, and I really don’t mind the not so great capabilities offered by it. There is only one email newsletter I get that isn’t dealing well with it, but that’s it. Everything else works fine and I am pretty happy that I don’t see overloaded newsletters anymore.
A petition doesn’t have a chance anyhow, and quite frankly, when I read “e-mail marketing”, I think of spam. So with that, I am pretty happy that the spam that makes it through my spam filters displays badly.
Patrick
February 6th, 2007 at 6:03
I am using an e-mail generator, the E-Mail Genertor uses a lot of Dreamweaver extensions (InterAKT..)..which is not working in Outlook 2007. What should i do to make E-mail generator compatible with outlook 2007
February 6th, 2007 at 12:53
Sarik,
you should ask whoever provided the E-Mail Generator. The vendor of that program is the only one who can answer your question.
Patrick
February 7th, 2007 at 2:09
Thanks Patrick!
But now I have to modify that E-Mail Genarator to make it compatible with Outlook 2007. So how is that possible and what i have to do so in order to make it compatible with Outlook 2007.
February 7th, 2007 at 2:20
Sarik,
I don’t know anything about that email generator, so unfortunately I cannot answer your question.
Patrick
February 7th, 2007 at 2:59
ok, Thanks Ptrick!
February 7th, 2007 at 2:59
Ok, Thanks Patrick!
March 8th, 2007 at 10:47
@knight: I like this idea. I completely agree with you that the end-user should decide how they best prefer to receive emails. Of course with greater CSS compatibility this might have been a viable option, but now…
March 19th, 2007 at 6:54
Another solution would be the option to pick your HTML renderer for Outlook yourself. This could basicly be put on “Word rendering”, “IE6 or IE7″ and even (to avoid product coupling) “third party”… but then again, it IS microsoft we are talking about.
March 19th, 2007 at 7:27
Ronald,
that may sound like a good solution, but it is extremely difficult to implement. It also would make Outlook less secure, which is very undesirable.
Patrick
April 9th, 2007 at 15:47
You can leave feedback for MS at
http://feedback.office.microsoft.com/eform.aspx?productkey=office2007
June 19th, 2007 at 18:06
[…] Great article on the subject. This one really breaks it down to its unbelievable sadness. […]