Microsoft and HTML Emails

Microsoft have today announced that in their upcoming release of Office 2010 that they will continue to use Word to render their HTML emails, once again going against the grain of the web community and specially the Email Standards Project.

HTML email is not perfect by any means and in some ways could be compared to website building around 10 years ago at the start of the standards campaign. With the huge range of email clients available it is a difficult task designing an effective HTML email that will display well in the majority of email clients and also degrade well so that the content is still viewable when images are turned off or in a client that only shows only plain text emails, and now with this decision Microsoft are making it even harder for the next five years or so. Microsoft Outlook is a widely used client in business and us designers will have to struggle to ensure support for this client whilst a lot of clients move towards using standards and increasing CSS support in email. With Internet Explorer still being a pain to get designs to render properly in, and Microsoft seemingly oblivious to a number of these concerns, it looks like they have ignored the general consensus again.

A campaign was started by the Email Standards Project and quickly created a buzz on Twitter as people announced their astonishment at the decision and after a day of condemnation and much gnashing of teeth, Microsoft announced their response to the concerns on the Outlook Blog by basically saying “thanks for telling us we’re wrong but we’re going to ignore you anyway”, as only Microsoft can.