Just when you thought it was getting a bit more reliable to build good-looking HTML emails, and have a reasonable expectation it might look good in most email clients….along comes Outlook 2007. Designers who use CSS, images, backgrounds, or image maps – beware. No – better yet – be ready to change everything.

In fact, we recommend you start changing your templates NOW…or you risk sending non-functional emails to an ever-growing base of email users.

Outlook 2007 came on to the scene last year with “some” fanfare. While most corporate environments and existing Outlook 2003 users have yet to upgrade. Little known or understood to those of us who SEND professional looking emails to our clients and prospects – this announcement has, and will have, an ever-growing impact on the email designs that we use.

The most-important thing to understand about this change is that Outlook 2007 now uses Microsoft Word as its rendering engine for all incoming emails. In other words, you can send a beautiful, robust email full of nice standards-conforming HTML. In Outlook 2003, this email would look great, because it uses Internet Explorer to render the emails….leaving the HTML alone. However, in Outlook 2007, Microsoft Word literally rewrites your beautiful HTML into Word-like HTML.

To underscore this difference, here’s a list of things you don’t want to do anymore in your templates/emails:

1.) No more animated GIFs. They either show up unanimated (may be OK), but in other instances they don’t show up at all.

Recommendation: Best just not to go down this route. However, if an animated GIF is an important eye-catching aspect of your campaign, it might be smart to clump into a specific list/group your web-based email subscribers, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, etc. You can send THEM the animated GIF version of your email, and everyone else a different version.

2.) Image maps are very problematic. They “appear” to be supported, however our exhaustive testing shows that Word redraws the image map coordinates and it’s very inconsistent. You may be hoping for a hyperlink to appear over a specific word or object in your image, only to find that in Outlook 2007 that same link has been moved a quarter-inch. Very frustrating. Most problematic are rectangular images that are taller than wide.

Recommendation: We strongly suggest you try to only use perfectly square images for image mapping – and even at that, we urge you to test it thoroughly with Outlook 2007 before sending. If your link has been moved within the image, then we suggest you simply hyperlink the whole image. If, however, you require more than one link, and want to map those links to specific spots, a popular alternative is something called image-splicing/splitting. This approach effectively splices your single image into several smaller images, and places it all into a nicely organized table (each image in its own cell). You can then hyperlink specific portions of the image that accomplish something similar to what you wanted with the original image map. A cool tool I use is only $24, called ImageSplitter, from Imagecure.com. Download it here to try it out:

http://www.imagecure.com/imgsplit.html

3.) Background images are no longer supported. Some of the industries more attractive templates often use background images within tables to present clever borders and repeating sidebars. Gmail doesn’t support background images either, by the way.

Recommendation: We suggest building designs that use more standard “background colors”, or use BOTH background images and background colors. In doing so, this gives your Outlook 2007 users a “Plan B”. In other words, everyone other than Outlook 2007 will still get the nice/cool background image (background images supersede background colors), and the Outlook 2007 users will get the background color.

4.) No more forms (e.g. survey questions, subscription boxes, forward to a friend fields). While the use of forms inside of your emails has been a bit risky to begin with (it can score higher in spam filters, and it requires you to write your form a certain way to actually work).

Recommendation: Link to surveys externally, or – if the question has a simple yes, no, maybe some kind of response – convert the answers into individual tracked links to a simple “thanks for your response” landing page.

5.) Other stuff: Not too much to recommend here, but the following things are also not supported:

no support for Flash, or other plugins
no support for CSS floats (e.g. ‘position’)
no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
no support for CSS positioning (e.g. margin height)

For a full review from Microsoft themselves, you are more than welcome to read the following “Release Notes” for Outlook 2007 and support for HTML/CSS:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx

The likely future of email design will be to build/control your entire layout using standard tables…the original way. We’ve gone a bit back in time here. Keep in mind that IE 8 is coming out this year, and it will actually provide even MORE CSS options (that won’t be supported in Outlook 2007)…what a mixed-message! Anyways, it means that you will have to be even more careful about your email design, and not take the common tactic of just “sending HTML that Dreamweaver creates”, for example.

Instead, TailoredMail has created templates that are tightly structured tables designed to keep you out of trouble for ALL email clients (e.g. AOL, Outlook 2003/2007, Hotmail, Notes, etc.).

Finally, I would suggest that you test, test, test. Create subscriber accounts for the following environments, at a minimum, and be sure to send a test-message to each before finalizing your campaign/broadcast:

- Outlook 2003 (great for testing Junk-folder behavior as well)
- Outlook 2007
- Hotmail
- AOL
- Gmail

We don’t suggest that you need Yahoo, as they are one of the best email clients that conform to standards. Gmail and Hotmail, for example, rewrite your HTML and strip many things out…best to test against these environments.

I hope this helps!

Matt Highsmith, CEO/President of TailoredMail