Microsoft Outlook 2007: What you need to know when developing e-mail newsletters
Microsoft chucked a wobbly into HTML email development with the release of Outlook 2007. Where previous versions of the e-mail client used the Internet Explorer rendering engine, the 2007 version has adopted the rendering engine of Microsoft Word.
In other words, the level of CSS and HTML support that Internet Explorer 6 provided for Outlook — and that Internet Explorer 7 would have provided — is gone.
There is an upside to the change. With the switch to a Word rendering engine, potentially dangerous tags like applet, object and script are not supported. But there are a whole lot of downsides as well, mostly in the form of diminished or non-existent support for several HTML attributes and CSS properties.
Some of what’s out:
- Background images. URL values for HTML background attribute and the CSS background property are no longer supported.
- Colspan, rowspan and frameborder values equal to zero. Colspan is still valid (i.e.
colspan="2"), but colspan with a value of zero is not. background-position,background-attachment,background-imageandbackground-repeat. The only supported background-* property is background (color values only) and background-color.- Support for custom list images using
list-style-image. - Support for animated .gif files. End-users will only see one frame.
- Support for Flash. Flash support in e-mail clients has always been iffy. Now it’s completely out for Outlook 2007.
- No support for floated elements. Keep in mind that most e-mail clients aren’t all that great at handling floats anyway.
If you’re using Dreamweaver MX 2004 or Dreamweaver 8 for Windows, you can download an Outlook validator that will tell you whether your email will work in Outlook 2007.
I’m also guessing that you can view your HTML file in Word (say, if you’re on a Mac or something) and get a rough idea about how it will look in Outlook.
More information
- Microsoft takes email design back 5 years
- Using CSS and HTML in email
- Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007 (Part 1 of 2)
