A major trending topic on Twitter today is the report that Microsoft is planning to abandon using the Internet Explorer rendering engine to display HTML emails in favour of the Word rendering engine in Outlook 2010.

According to http://fixoutlook.org/ this is tragic news. Email designs will have to revert to table layouts. No CSS elements, no background images no quite a lot of other things.

This is not new however, Outlook has used Word since the 2007 edition. Microsoft’s official line on the reasoning behind this is user experience. They think you the user will have a much better time composing your emails using Word and all it’s toys like Smart Art, templates etc.
Basically, Microsoft are using the Word rendering engine so emails composed in Outlook will look consistent when viewed by other Outlook users. Typically they have completely ignored the fact that every other HTML capable email client on the planet uses a web browser to render HTML email, and email composed in Word is going to look a bit rubbish in those at best.
Word is and always has been notoriously bad at composing HTML anyway. Seriously bloated code causes web pages created in Word to perform very strangely at best or not at all in many modern web browsers.

Surely Microsoft understand that if an Outlook 2010 user sends a Word formatted email to a friend using Apple Mail or Thunderbird and it’s unreadable, both sender and receiver suffer a poor experience. By aiming to please Outlook-to-Outlook senders, they are punishing Outlook customers who send to those using other email clients. Given the fact that Outlook 2007 only commands around 7% email client market share, it’s easy to see how short-sighted this is.

By updating the Word engine so it can compose and render standards based HTML, all of these problems are solved. Outlook customers can receive email from outside sources without formatting problems. They can also rest assured that any emails they send to friends and colleagues not using Outlook will display as intended.

Microsoft is looking for feedback on this and http://fixoutlook.org/ has initiated the fixoutlook.org Twitter campaign. Just tweet your thoughts and include http://fixoutlook.org in the tweet along with the hash tag @msofficeus.

Our own thoughts on this are, HTML email is the spawn of the devil and should never have been born. It is the domain of spammers, virus and trojan writers. Sane sensible people read and write all email as plain text and never download images included in HTML email.
We also never use Outlook but that’s just us.

More information on the email standards project can be found here.