Will Outlook 2007 Wreck Your E-Mail? Working Around Outlook 2007's HTML Weakness Brian Livingston
What Microsoft Says About the Problem
Molly Holzschlag, group lead for the Web Standards Project, writes in her blog that Microsoft wanted to use the same backend to display e-mails as it uses to create e-mails. For years, various versions of Outlook have used the MS Word word processor to compose messages. Since Word wasn't very good at creating standard HTML code, such messages often looked different to recipients when rendered by Outlook using IE.
Unfortunately, Microsoft chose to "dumb down" Outlook 2007's rendering to that of MS Word rather than bringing Word's capabilities up to the level of IE.
Microsoft has posted an explanation of the HTML standards that Word 2007 — and now Outlook 2007 — will not support. The Redmond company also offers a free, downloadable validator that attempts to alert you to features of your e-mail messages that Outlook 2007 will no longer understand.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft didn't switch from its IE rendering engine to the one in Word because of any security concerns. Most PC users know that previous versions of Outlook are notorious for executing e-mail viruses distributed by black-hat hackers.
But these kinds of security risks mainly existed because Outlook 2000 and previous versions opened messages in IE's "trusted zone," where they could run amok. That was corrected in Outlook 2000 by an e-mail attachment security update that Microsoft released in 2001. And every succeeding version of Outlook opens e-mails by default in the "restricted zone," where they can do much less damage.
No, the failings of Outlook 2007 are simply due to a decision by Microsoft developers to make life a little easier on themselves by using the same engine to display messages that Outlook 2007 uses to create them.
How to Work Around Outlook 2007's Weakness
Michelle Eichner, vice president of client services for Pivotal Veracity, says, "There is no option to change Outlook 2007" from Word's rendering engine to IE's. "There are always going to be things that Word will not render as well as IE."
That doesn't mean that Word can't be improved, however. Companies that rely on e-mail to communicate with their customers can make it clear to Microsoft that Word's lack of support for Web standards is one more thing that the software giant needs to patch.
Until that time, e-mail creators must work around Outlook 2007 by simplifying their messages, using only those basic techniques that the new e-mail program actually does understand. Since approximately 75 percent of e-mail recipients use some version of Outlook or Outlook Express — and Outlook 2007 is expected to soon become a large fraction of this user base — Microsoft once again provides us with a definition of "lowest common denominator."
Pivotal Veracity's 43-page PowerPoint presentation can help companies understand what works and doesn't work in Outlook 2007. To get your copy, visit the company's special reports page. Free e-mail registration is required; the report is sent to the e-mail address you provide. Pivotal Veracity is a reputable firm and says that it won't give out or make any other use of your e-mail address, unless you specifically request contact. In our opinion, this is a report you should take a look at.
