Will Microsoft's Outlook 2007 ruin our email designs?

Some of you may have heard about the new Windows operating system called Vista. One program you get when you upgrade to Vista is the new email application Outlook 2007. This program will render HTML-based emails very differently from the old Outlook. Herein lies our concern.

New Rendering Engine

For the truly geeky among you, here's how it breaks down. The old Outlook (Outlook 2004 and prior) used the Internet Explorer rendering engine to display HTML-based emails. Thus, an HTML-based email would look identical whether you viewed it in your web browser or in your email program. This made the creation of well-designed HTML emails relatively easy for designers and email marketers.

With Outlook 2007, Microsoft has changed all that. The new Outlook will use the HTML rendering engine from its ubiquitous word processing program, Microsoft Word. And that's where it gets funky. Word renders HTML in a very different way than Explorer. To be blunt, Word is far worse than Explorer. Microsoft has taken a giant step backward by using a rendering engine that is not compliant with modern coding conventions. We're mad at Microsoft for that.

What it means for you

When (if) you upgrade to Vista, you may notice that some of your emails look different, especially those that are the online newsletter type of emails or other HTML-based messages. And you'll be able to tell immediately which of your subscription providers has responded to the change and which haven't. But you can expect them all to conform eventually. So this isn't earth shattering, it's just annoying.

Relax. We're on top of things.

We're very geeky, and we're very attuned to the situation. House & Home will soon be altering the coding conventions of our monthly email newsletter product for Realtors in order to maximize compatibility and faithful rendering across all email programs and platforms. We're not panicking, since the adoption rate of Outlook 2007 is expected to be rather slow. We'll let you know when further details arise.

The Upshot

We're all about making our clients email newsletters look the best they can. To that end, we plan to respond swiftly to these new changes.

'Til Next Time

If you have questions or article ideas for this newsletter, please send them to me: . Expect another issue of our Best Practices in another month or so. As always, I thank you for your kind attention.