13:37 Thursday, 25 June 2009
Fix Outlook
Used to be that Lotus Notes was the bane of developers producing HTML email, for example newsletters. Lotus Notes 8 is better but still a large number of people are using the wretched Notes 6. At least IBM improved the product with the version 8 update. However, a new worst case email client appeared a few years ago and we've been banging our heads ever since. It's Microsoft Outlook 2007. Versions before 2007 (2003, etc.) were OK at rendering HTML but in the 2007 "upgrade" Microsoft switched in the Word HTML renderer which is appalling. This matters because lots of email (50% from our figures) is received in Outlook. So Notes got better but Outlook got worse. Two steps forward and a giant leap backwards. Which means that all the things we were waiting to do in email when Notes got upgraded (since it used to be the worst) we still can't do because Outlook is back to where Notes 6 was in 1999. Forget background-colors, images and any thing remotely interesting for layout.
Microsoft is, of course, planning Outlook 2010 and apparently planning on keeping the bad renderer. Why not use the one from IE8? Who knows... Let's stay firmly in the 20th century. Anyhoo, there's a Twitter movement to persuage MS to see the Outlook light.
A good overview of HTML support is various email clients is available at the Email Standards Project.
Update:MS have a clueless head-in-the-sand response to this issue: here's the facts Word is crap at rendering HTML and it's crap at producing HTML and the ease with which non-standard emails can be produced and hence only read in Outlook is not a feature - it's a bug. All we want is standards compliance. IE is getting there (just). Why not Outlook?
