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FixOutlook.org

I love the feeling one gets when they realize they are not alone.

July 26, 2007, I was at Ajax Experience and asked the presenter Chris Wilson from Microsoft a question:

Outlook 2007 doesn’t use the IE renderer and seems to be much less standards compliant, “Why did Microsoft do this to me?!?”

While Chris isn’t part of that team, he sees what they were trying to do: increase consistency between what is used for rendering received email and what is used for creating outgoing mail. He believes that team does realize that it’s a problem and will be working on it.

After that, I wrote a series of blog posts about how to create emails that look good and are consistent across email clients.

  1. http://commadot.com/the-holy-mail/
  2. http://commadot.com/cross-client-html-email-v2/
  3. http://commadot.com/email-best-practices/
  4. http://commadot.com/outlook-to-gmail-formatting-annoyance/

Basically, I have been trying to make email templates that work.  I was hoping that Chris Wilson’s promise to fix the issue would come true.  Unfortunately, it is not coming true.  So Campaign Monitor made a stand and created FixOutlook.org.  Click through and join the movement if you care.

The current state of affairs is ridiculous and creates a ton of wasted energy making professional looking marketing messages.  I am glad that Campaign Monitor is doing this.

Comments

One response to “FixOutlook.org”

  1. Dan Avatar
    Dan

    How long will it be before you can create something artistic on the computer as quickly as you can if you actually draw it on paper. You talk about adding shadows to a box on the computer and how difficult that can be, but it’s pretty easy by hand. I believe this is because you are creating code and not an actual picture. But when will that change and you can just create a picture and have the code be completely in the background. Basically, you create an image, like a jpeg, but can still add functionality.

    I have a somewhat similar problem. I want to email out a newsletter we created, but it was created in MS Publisher (a pretty horrible program). There is no way to copy of the Publisher file and re-create it in an email (without screwing up the picture). This is because the computer is copying the code and than rendering it again, instead of copying the image and (re)writing the code to make it look it’s supposed too. I think there needs to be some kind of universal translator that takes whatever you have, analyzes it, and figures out how to exactly replicate that in whatever program it is.

    Reply

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