While it is pretty much the standard email client, Microsoft Outlook has long had problems rendering HTML correctly in emails. And the latest version, Outlook 2010, due sometime in the next several months, doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better — and it actually may be worse. And a lot of users aren’t happy about it at all.
A group of people apparently felt strongly enough to create a site called Outlook’s broken — Let’s fix it. The site is simple, it’s a constantly updating stream of users tweeting out their desire for Microsoft to fix this problem with Outlook. Right now, it’s just about 6,000 tweets, but it’s growing about a tweet every second (even at this hour of the night here in the U.S.). When a new tweet comes in, that user’s icon appears on the screen next to hundreds of other icons that had previously tweeted about it. And as the stream updates, random tweets about fixing Outlook are flashed on the screen.
Here’s the text from the site:
Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.
This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.
Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft wants your feedback. It’s time to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.
Let’s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.
Join 5,927 others asking Microsoft to improve standards support and make sure you include fixoutlook.org in your tweet. We’ll pull together every tweet that includes the link here to give Microsoft a unified message from the community.
Again, to have your voice heard in this cause, simply include the http://fixoutlook.org/ URL somewhere in your tweet. Here’s the comparison image of what HTML rendering looks like in Outlook 2000 versus what it will look like in Outlook 2010.
Update: Here’s some info on who created the site:
Who built the site?
This site is the brainchild of the Email Standards Project, an organisation working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.
Update 2: A day later, the number of tweets in support of this has grown to 20,000. Microsoft has responded, saying basically that Outlook isn’t broken and that, “There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability.”
Hmm, I don’t see these types of campaigns against any of the other email clients though. Expect this campaign to continue.
is there any MS product which is not broken?
Paint?
Notepad!
Notepad is a pretty solid app. Could use a better icon though.
lol
classic
notepad is a very solid app. wordpad on the other hand is fucked
Notepad has a widely documented bug, I’m sure you all know it.
“bush hid the Bombs”
any sentence that is 4 words long, with 4 letters in the first word, 3 letters in the next two and 5 in the last cannot be saved.
This is a hoax…notepad is saving this sentence perfectly fine..:)
No, it’s “Bush Hid the Facts” or truth, I can’t remember, without the quotation marks obviously. When you save it, then open it again, it is only little boxes.
“bush hid the facts” I thought this was an easter egg!!! ohh I can no longer trust this note pad, it was one of my most used tools….
Doesn’t notepad still have that 64k file limit? BROKEN!
Umm, no. Did it ever have such a limit?
“The file you are trying to open is too big for Notepad, would you like to open it in WordPad instead?”
[OK] [Cancel]
are you working on Windows 98? the limit was leafted, also notepad is made for simple text edits not to edit your disk image!!!
ummmm… Notepad?
Troll detector 2009
hmmmmmmmmm… got it. command.com
Guys… Even the mac-guy agrees on their spreadsheet
cry me a river. try lotus notes for a day.
MS Solitaire (on Win XP) broke for me once, allowed me to place the wrong colour (right number) card on a stack.
I don’t understand this. Since when do spammers get to decide how software companies should implement their products?
That’s like accepting that car thieves advise Ford on how to design their cars locks!
Microsoft can seem slow and out of touch at times obviously but I have a hard time believing this will be how outlook mail will look.
Then you are either naive, foolish or just uninformed. I have had the displeasure of having to make HTML emails work in outlook. Believe it, for it is so.
Well, believe it. It’s like this already and they’re doing nothing to fix it. It makes designing email newsletters a complete pain in the ass.
You mean SPAM?
Yes, because all email newsletters ARE spam.
People definitely are never interested in receiving information they are actually interested in.
you’re a poo face!
immature? good. now you know how your comment sounded.
One thing that puzzles me, Windows live mail… why do MS have 2 different email clients? Wasn’t the point of windows live mail to replace outlook?
Windows Live Mail replaced Outlook Express.
These are free software for home users.
Outlook is paid software for big corporations, integration with ActiveDirectory, IT department setting mail rules, etc etc. It’s part of MS Office.
Ah ha, thanks Dan I got it now
ok, that screenshot comparison makes 2010 look appalling. Definitely a backward step.
notice how they use Outlook 2000 for the comparison? That’s because Outlook 2007 already works this way using Word as the rendering engine….
It’s been in the market 2 years. Every marketing email I get works just fine…
Marketing emails work fine because people like me design them to use only the retarded, last-century HTML that Outlook understands. The cost of this work increases overheads and makes everything you buy a tiny bit more expensive.
To everyone still using Microsoft: Quit whining and use software alternatives.
Ulrike.
The problem is with companies who send out emails and want them to look profession. You have no choice but to bow to the whims of outlook so your clients see the email correctly.
It’s all going to be okay though. Google’s Wave will replace email and we can all live in a wonderful utopia of awesome looking messages.
How will fixing Outlook help in this case? After all, the email senders will still want to support readers using old Outlook versions. (Just like website developers still have to support IE 6, which is 8 years old.)
Your problem is that you’re trying to reason with the hordes and their loudmouth post-happy leader.
I have never known a bigger bunch of cry-babies than the type you find working at the intersection of programming/design. In other fields, trade-offs and compromises are a given, and there’s no time to engage in a whinge-fest each time some product doesn’t meet your utopian standards.
I love telling the freelancers that work on our site here that I want the splash page on our site to be jazzed up. It’s worse than insulting their mother.
Google Wave will fix everything and make email happy and pretty always? It sounds too good to be true.
Chris, you do have a choice, and that is to ignore Microsoft and force users of Microsoft software to see how awful things look for them when rendered ‘correctly’. Instead of pandering to Microshit, or begging them to make things right, we should boycott them entirely.
You mean, like, quit my microsoft mouse and use a software alternative?
People still use Outlook? LOL…
Idiots who still use Outlook deserve to have a horrible experience for not knowing how to pick better.
Never worked in a large business eh?
lucky him. I did and left ASAP.
They can switch to Thunderbird. Or do what more and more businesses are doing and use Google Apps and forgo desktop apps entirely.
There is a version of Outlook between 2000 and 2010 ya know. This isn’t knew, they broke it in the last version and are simply continuing to use the broken version in 2010.
Specifically, rather than using an HTML rendering component for e-mail, they are using Microsoft Word. That’s great for integrating Outlook with the rest of MS Office, but horrible for rendering HTML e-mails coming from outside the office.
Dan is correct, this is something that is already a problem with 2007. Campaign Monitor has done a really good job of making this issue known and Microsoft did respond with their reasoning behind it (you create emails with the Word rendering engine, so they should display the same way).
And a clarification to this article, “one such user” that created this site is CampaignMonitor.com, a company in the business of sending pretty e-mails. I highly doubt anyone there is actually an Outlook user beyond as a client for e-mail testing.
thanks dan.
Just to add a bit more clarification – http://fixoutlook.org is a collaboration project for the Email Standards Project, managed by Campaign Monitor and designed and developed by Newism.
Cloud alternatives FTW!
Why the fuck would you use outlook when you’ve got so much better web apps to handle your email?
Excuse me, are you an idiot? What other client would YOU use to access Exchange?
Outlook is livable… Entourage is plain awful.
large corps u idiot
Because as mentioned earlier a lot of big businesses still use it. So when you’re doing e-mail marketing (or any other e-mail announcement that has to be in HTML) you just can’t ignore it unfortunately. Btw OUtlook 2007 has exactly the same problems. It’s a real pain.
There’s no such thing as an email that *has* to be HTML. Period. Attach a PDF if formatting is important.
On fixing Outlook: make plain text email work properly (with plain text replies prefixed with ‘>’).
OE Quotefix gets us halfway there on older versions, but it shouldn’t take a third-party app to make an email program do email.
“There’s no such thing as an email that *has* to be HTML. Period. Attach a PDF if formatting is important.”
+1. Much ado for a niche use case.
Most PDF attachments are viruses, so no sane person would open one unless they checked with the sender first.
Switch to Thunderbird or Gmail, or something else! Outlook has never properly supported IMAP standard in order to push it’s Exchange solution…
Wake up folks! Time to try something new!
Huh? IMAP works great in Outlook 2007 (at least in SP2)
Nope. IMAP works barely in Outlook. If you think IMAP is good in Outlook, check out Thunderbird.
What doesn’t work about it?
I use it with GMail and it works great. Basically the same integration I get on my iPhone. Plus I get all the great Outlook features like instant search, can reply from my alternate accounts, etc.
I’ve never seen anything about Thunderbird that indicated it was better.
Outlook had major IMAP perf / UI hang issues in the past, but with Outlook 2007 SP2 I’ve had no such problems.
In terms of any kind of standards for email, Gmail is pretty horrific too.
And for the folks that simply say, “you are an idiot, switch email clients”… That doesn’t solve anything. Most of the commentariat are interested and informed and know that there are better options out there.
But most of the computer using public doesn’t know to even ask the questions that would result in a better experience for them. And with various flavors of Outlook commanding 30%+ of email views, this creates an extremely uneven environment for effectively communicating with the various client-types.
“Email is not a walled garden”
Now the fixoutlook.org website is broken itself. let us fix them.
It shows 5 Have Your Say buttons.
Not for me… are you using broken IE6?
This is so true, power to the people for Pete’s sake please listen to the users Microsoft.
Well like others have said what does work correctly at Microsoft,its a race to see who can patent something so someone else has to pay for it.And as for Microsoft we can see why your interested in Yahoo its also broken,the reason we have so many different choices is becuase no one has everything together for all programs,wouldnt it be nice to go to Yahoo or Google or Microsoft for antivirus,photo,office,whatever you want and have ever program work,Microsoft Outlook sucks,IE8 sucks,and why do we need new programs,how about just keep working on the one you have,when we get AVG antivurus we dont need a whole new program its AVG antivirus 1.1.1 then 1.1.2. wouldnt that make sense
Not one full stop. I’m a sa-a-a-a-a-ad panda.
A petition on Twitition bas been set up, asking Microsoft to rethink thier use of Word in outlook 2010 http://www.twitition.com/vyfsg.
Bearing in mind twitition has already been named as “in-part responsible” for AT&T’s iPhone upgrade u-turn and GoogleEarth updating their Iranian imagery I say lets see if we can collectively try for a third major scalp on this one. Sign here http://www.twitition.com/vyfsg
If MS could only fix my ability to put in non-recurring calendar entries – instead of their 1st Tuesday every month crap.
How about CTRL-Click calendar boxes to select multiple days Microsoft… ever hear of that function?
The settings dialog jungle of Outlook is so incredibly convoluted and byzantine that it boggles the mind. I always get COMPLETELY lost even when just making simple changes. That is also something that needs to be desperately fixed. ASAP.
Indeed, the whole package is a textbook example of what happens when a company adds layer after layer of features to a product that already worked well 10 years ago: bloat, bloat, and more bloat.
The window that opens when just writing a simple email has a complexity I image is only equalled in nuclear power stations.
I am a fan of office — It is still the best package out there (although I am a Linux user). But Outlook should be buried in an unmarked grave and a new start made.
Amen.
“even at this hour of the night here in the U.S”
What a typically Americentric view. Believe it or not both Outlook and Twitter are used globally and I think you will find that the vast majority of Twitters submitted so far on this topic come from Europe.
When America wakes up, I am sure it will join the protest.
Who the fuck cares about HTML in e-mail but spammers and secret services (to hide the trojan they’re installing on your box right now)?
There’s no life for HTML in e-mail. Period.
Who cares about HTML email – every business that doesn’t send out letters on blank paper in preference to headed notepaper.
Who cares about HTML email – every user that has ever wanted to send a link or photo to a friend.
Was it a trick question? Mind you I remember a dev on kmail telling me we shouldn’t be using email for photos and that I should instead have my MiL hookup an FTP client and push to her server space … mind you she has now managed to sign up for fb, so perhaps …
@pbhj
PDF is the solution for consistent, non-plain-text messaging. Depending on any mail client to render your beautifully constructed HTML email is simply foolish, and invites complaints.
Sending a link or a photo is a non-issue. This is about rendering HTML newsletters so their style and layout remain consistent with the designer’s intent.
If I sign up to a newsletter and it came as a PDF I would think they were living in the Stone Age.
Also, a lot of businesses block emails with attachments completely.
“Who cares about HTML email – every user that has ever wanted to send a link or photo to a friend.”
Don’t confuse the issue by throwing this in and trying to make the problem look bigger than it is. Sending links and photos works fine in Outlook.
Hmmm, the point of changing the HTML renderer in Outlook 2007 was to avoid the security problems inherent in using embedded IE (the obvious alternative). Personally I think this was a benefit. If that means fewer emails laden with HTML and JavaScript, that’s a win too.
Tim
You guys realize that the product is still “Under Development” correct?
I love how people that haven’t written a line of code past – 10 PRINT “Hello” jump all over MSFT.
There isn’t even a public preview yet. They will fix it.
“They will fix it.”
Just like they fixed it in Outlook 2007, eh?
Microsoft made a decision to favor stronger integration with Office suite of applications in Outlook at the cost of proper HTML rendering. They’re not going to “fix” that.
Read Tim’s post above.
As much as I hate to admit it, Outlook is not going away, so we have to deal with it. I was personally offended when I found out they were using Word to render HTML in their 2007 suite. Word? What! They had just released IE7 and were touting its superiority to other browsers. Pshhh….
At this point, we can only pray to the evil Microsoft Gods that they will wise up and fix this before they release it. Otherwise, they will continue to stunt the growth of the web.
C’mon! /Gob Voice
fear not.
in OS X Leopard you will get the most HTML compliant mail application which works with Exchange.
There’s also a vocal population who think HTML email is the equivalent of glossy junk mail. I can count on one hand the number of serious or useful messages I’ve ever received which have been “pretty”.
Even if you’re not a fan of HTML email (completely understand why some people are not), support for it isn’t going anywhere. HTML support is built into every major email client by default, which is why standards are so important. If it’s not going anywhere, we might as well make it better.
Check out this post for an expanded version of this point.
http://www.camp...andards-supp-1/
Exactly. I use text, and text only in email. If I have to wait for images to load, in Outlook, Gmail, or anywhere else, I’m not going to read the message.
Email should be sent as plain text. I welcome OWA Basic’s inability (apparently) to send emails in anything other than plain text. The medium is not the message.
Go on and read further why such (email related topics) conversations will be irrelevant in the future
http://barryhar...nd-context.html
Google reinvents email – why?
HTML e-mail just needs to die. Forget fixing Outlook, just stop sending crap HTML e-mail and send me a plain txt link. I’ll click it if it want to.
=)
A professional, standards driven approach to email design doesn’t deprive you of that right and will include a text-only alternative. If you choose to view all of your email as text, this effort changes nothing in your environment.
This is true. For those that like plain text email; you will continue to receive it.
Those that prefer HTML in email should be able to expect a standard method of rendering it.
I can’t think of a single person who “prefers” to RECEIVE HTML emails … only those who “prefer” to SEND it.
And I agree that those who “prefer” to SEND email containing HTML HOPE it will render consistently, but they should EXPECT it to render differently on Microsoft mail clients.
This has been true for ALL Microsoft HTML rendering products, from Word to MSIE … they ALL use Microsoft’s own personal view of what HTML is and how it should behave. The others do just fine … it’s Microsoft that’s the odd man out, here. I’m not sure why anyone is expecting the next gen to be any different.
Haha. Well put. Perhaps we should be THANKING Microsoft for helping to fascilitate a world where HTML email senders are frustrated and thus don’t create them in the first place.
I know lots of them, actually.
It’s mainly geeks and nerds who cream their jeans over the simplicity of text
I can’t stand text email. Anything other than short mails is unreadable without the formatting that html gives you. And emails that I subscribe to from magazines, stores etc, wouldn’t get read (by me) if they were plain text. HTML mail is the only acceptable form in this day and age.
Also, I’m a user of Outlook 2007 (at work anyway), and I get a lot of html emails that render completely correctly. If 2007 & 2010 have the same rendering engine, I’m wondering whether this campaign is necessary at all. 2007 works okay, doesn’t it? People manage to send html emails that display correctly, don’t they?
I prefer to receive “pretty” emails. So there, you know one person now.
… just do the Colayer way
http://blog.int...einvents-email/
http://barryhar...nd-context.html
One thing I don’t notice them saying is how its already like this in outlook 2007. I can see they want to ‘fix it’, and go back to how 03 was.
But do people realize that IE isn’t built on standards either? Fixing it would mean going to IE – which would still be a ’standards’ problem (though, much less of one)
IE is built on web standards… Lest you forget that it was the first browser to support CSS.
IE 6 / 7 fell behind with the new standards but IE8 catches up pretty well to CSS 2.1 and such.
It’s all about they cannot do a good, standards based engine since many years…
So don’t use Outlook as your e-mal client.
why complain switch to Mozilla’s Thunderbird client or PostBox. They are free
To all of you who keep on saying how bad it is and how Outlook users are idiots for using it – what are the alternatives when you need to access exchange?
Give me an example of one product other than outlook that can access an Exchange Server without slow downs and using the Exchange protocols and not PO or MAPI (Snow Leopard does not qualify since Outlook is a Windows Product and the morons using it are obviously using Windows PCs).
Come on…. where are your responses?
Saying that MS are broken is a small story.
But this is a nice way to post a demonstration.
Touche!
http://ftp.exe – whilst you think Notepad is ok, ftp is still the same code written at UC Berkeley in 1983 and still does what it does without much of a problem.
Seriously, open http://ftp.exe in Notepad, and enjoy reading “(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.”
Uh, the autolinks are not mine. Thanks TC.
as a tech worker, i’ve never used outlook, and it surprises me that anyone would love and/or use the program enough to protest it via twitter…idiots.
Why all the hate for html emails? You don’t like fancy signatures and slick corporate newsletters? Maybe emails should be limited to 140 characters like Twitter. That would make standards really simply to comply with.
Eventually Microsoft will have to comply to standards because their market share will drop lower and lower. Why would anyone use IE8? The only people still using IE are people that don’t know what a web browser is.
Reality check time, just as many people use IE6 as firefox, many people will get IE8 because it is familiar and allowed on their corporate machines. Just like twice as many people returning their cheap linux netbooks as windows ones because they don’t want to learn a whole new OS. The general population does not like change.
I don’t use outlook so I don’t really care.
On the other hand, that is a really cool site. I wish the people who made it would release it as open source software!
In other news: who still cares about newsletters? 95% of newletters I receive in my inbox are spam anyway. Send me plain text emails for all I care.
agreed.
html in emails makes bbry users cry
The hate on for anything microsoft is getting old. If there were better products than outlook (and word, excel, etc) then most people would be using them.
I guess Google Wave is in that direction and so is Colayer. See the 2 blogs:
http://barryhar...nd-context.html
http://blog.int...einvents-email/
Long live nPOP email client.
http://www.nakk.../index_eng.html
Microsoft just responded on their blog, and basically ignored the campaign.
Which is good, because the whole thing is just a marketing gimmick Campaign Monitor is running to get more web designers to sign up for their expensive services.
Microsoft Bob is broked for me. Any else having same problem?
Just wait for office 2010 and windows 7. you will forget about mac or lotus. Both the products will raise Microsoft to next level of supremacy in IT industry.
http://www.ekhichdi.com
Tina
What is html in emails used for?
- Newsletters
- Spam mails
In both cases I don’t mind not seeing the colors and designs.
Microsoft response here:
http://blogs.ms...in-outlook.aspx
Rather misses the point unfortunately.
Microsoft made the right call by switching over to the word rendering engine, this is just someone looking to get some publicity by pulling off a stunt like this.
There are many new features that have been added to outlook based on this new engine..
Every product/update has its own pros and cons, thats why we have versions being created. I’m, now, not sure how far this information is going to be true.
wow, a campaign started by spammers..
what a great idea.