Outlook 2003 / Exchange Multipart Email Gotcha

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:35:00 --0100

We use Exchange 2003 internally, together with Outlook 2003 as an email client. Outlook does not handle multipart emails correctly - any attempt to preview the plain text version of the email results in showing a conversion of the HTML version into plain text, rather than the text/plain alternative. [More]

Outlook 2007 breaks CSS formatted HTML emails

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:10:00 --0100

Unbelievably, Microsoft have made the decision to break the HTML rendering engine in Outlook 2007. Previous versions of Outlook used the Internet Explorer rendering engine, and generally speaking, could be relied upon to render HTML emails fairly consistently. Outlook 2007 uses the MS Word (that's right - MS Word) rendering engine to view HTML emails - with disastrous consequences... Main Casualties:

Float / Clear
Positioning
Entire Box Model
Background images

See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx for the official word... So for those of us involved with Email Marketing (or worse still Email Marketing Systems), it looks like its back to table based layouts :( Honestly, what are Microsoft thinking of!!!!

- Outlook

Outlook 2003 / Exchange Multipart Email Gotcha

Outlook 2007 breaks CSS formatted HTML emails