Changes With MS Outlook 2007 and How They Affect You

I asked Raj Jambotkar, our Product Manager here at VerticalResponse to chime on what Microsoft has been doing with their new release of Outlook and what implications it has on us, our customers and the email marketing industry. Here are his comments. This is a very good and very important read.

"I think we've all experienced a software upgrade at some point that throws you for a loop.  The 'Next' button on the left is now on the right, a new step-by-step wizard replaces the old workflow, or unfortunately, your favorite feature has been removed for some unknown reason.  Last year, Microsoft quietly made a subtle change to their Outlook 2007 product which has just recently sent the entire e-mail marketing industry scrambling.

What's changed?

Microsoft changed how HTML emails are sent and presented in Outlook 2007 (compared to previous versions).  Previously, users would create a fancy looking e-mail and their recipient would see something that looked noticeably different than the original design.  To solve this problem, Microsoft surprisingly chose the least common denominator and effectively 'dumbed down' the way e-mails are presented to the recipient.  (For the tech savvy readers: previous Outlook versions used Internet Explorer to render HTML e-mails.  Outlook 2007 now uses the historically weak Word HTML engine for this task.) Effectively, your ability to create a dynamic & stylish HTML e-mail campaign is now significantly restricted because of this subtle change in the world's most popular corporate e-mail client software.

Does this affect me?  If so, how?

You'll want to consider & adjust for this if you send HTML email campaigns to recipients who are using Outlook, which 99% of you do.  Even if your recipients are not using the 2007 version right now, it is likely that they will upgrade in the near future.  The masses of users have yet to adopt this upgrade. You (or your HTML designer) will need to adjust your HTML design to account for the following new restrictions:

Images & Rich Content:

1. Background images in DIV tags and TABLE cells won't be rendered.  (This is will likely cause the most headaches for designers.)
2. Animated GIFs will not be animated.  It's best to leave these out of the design completely.
3. Flash content & fancy bullet images will not be displayed.  Similar to animated gifs, these should be dropped from the design.

Layout & Forms:

1. Layouts that rely mostly on CSS (for positioning) will need to be changed to a table based layout instead.
2. Forms (signups, surveys, etc.) won't work at all.  Linking to forms is acceptable, just not embedding it in the body of the email. One of the reasons our "forward-to-a-friend" is now a link instead of a form.

To give you an example, here is an email rendered in the old version of Outlook...

...here is an example of the same email in Outlook 2007.

What can VerticalResponse do to help me out?

For starters, here are a few links for you and/or your web designer to read over:
Microsoft's official explanation & gory details re: the changes
An e-mail marketing designer shares some of his suggestions on how to cope/adjust

We're adjusting things on our end (just like some of our customers) to adhere to the new restrictions.  A good number of our existing standard email borders are currently being reworked to make them compliant with Outlook 2007.  We'll let you know when this work has been completed.  Additionally, we'll be adding some functionality to the campaign creation process that will automatically scan for and alert you about any 'non-compliant' HTML elements in your design.

This is upgrade is undoubtedly a step backwards for e-mail marketing community as a whole.  Microsoft has gotten an earful from the industry so far - we'll keep you posted about their response!"

- Raj Jambotkar, VerticalResponse Product Manager

Please comment if you have any questions, they'll be answered right away.

 

Comments

[Lindsay]

I created an email, with the table background a certain color in some cells. In some instances, after a color blocked heading in the color portion of the table, a white space appears when went to Outlook 2007 that does not appear in other programs? Why is this happening, if the suggestion is to start using tables with background color versus images? When will the code validator be available on Vertical Response?

[Scott]

Our test push emails are showing up correctly on the Apple Mac side, but in Outlook 2007 the HTML portion of the emails are showing up as text - the HTML code is in text form. Other HTML formatted emails are displaying correctly in Outlook. Any ideas? Thanks!

[Heather]

I'm concerned our email campaigns are displaying properly in Outlook 2007, as we still use 2003.

Does iBuilder check for Outlook 2007 compliance yet? Thanks in advance.