“that instead of using the Word HTML rendering that previous versions of Mac Office used (and the PC version as well), Microsoft has moved over to Apple’s Webkit rendering engine to render HTML mails.  Outlook 2011 also uses WebKit to create HTML mail.”

We don’t have any official confirmation at this stage, so don’t go throwing out your <tables> yet. If this pans out, it would be a huge step forward for Microsoft, even if it turns out to be a Mac only change. Using Webkit to both create and render emails works around Microsoft’s main reason for sticking with the Word renderer, which was consistency of display for their customers using MS tools.

Perhaps that FixOutlook.org poster caught someone’s eye!  We look forward to bringing you updates as we dig in and see if this is for real. If it is, a big round of applause, and thanks to whoever was responsible.

If you’ve wondered why the Email Standards Project  has gone so quiet, it is because unfortunately we’ve not had a lot of news. However, we’re still here, and we’re still working on ways to improve the capabilities of email clients in the long term.

We want to say thank you to everyone who has taken part so far, whether by tweeting or blogging or taking part in our Gmail Grimace or Fix Outlook campaigns.

What’s next?

Later this year we will be rerunning all of our email client tests, and possibly expanding them out to other email clients. Remember, this is about improving the situation for most designers, and that means concentrating on the mass market email tools which give us the most trouble. So while it is great to know that the latest free web mail client renders well, it isn’t really our role to test it.

We definitely appreciate your feedback though - what are the capabilities most troublesome and in which email clients are you running into the most problems?  One piece of good news for designers is that mobile email clients are becoming more popular and the rendering we’ve seen so far has been pretty good. Webkit based email readers are by nature much easier to work with than traditional desktop engines.

In the corporate world Outlook still dominates, and that’s going to be true for quite some time yet. We’re not giving up on improving the next version of Outlook, and we’ll be asking for your help again in the future. Thanks for being part of this project!

The first shot features William Kennedy, VP of Office and Jeanne Sheldon, VP of Word (nice shirt Jeanne) hanging out next to the mosaic’s new home in the Office team’s hallway.

This second photo was taken at the entrance to the Microsoft campus and includes a number of Word and Outlook team members who have worked on HTML rendering in Office over the years.

I’ve got to give Microsoft an enormous amount of credit for this. They could have ignored our feedback completely, but instead proved they are genuinely listening to our feedback and are prepared to have a bit of fun doing it. It is clear that these guys really do care about giving their customers the best experience possible.

While there is still no confirmation about what impact this will have on the rendering in Outlook, this is a big step for the Office team to take publicly. William and the rest of the Office team have assured me they will keep in touch as they plan their next release. You guys will be the first to hear if we have any news to share. In the mean time, let’s keep the feedback going by adding your vote for better HTML support.

Bravo Microsoft.

We were unsure if we would hear back from the Office team, but were pleasantly surprised today when a large package straight from Redmond arrived on our doorstep. William Kennedy, the Corporate VP of Office was kind enough to send a personal letter to us thanking us for our efforts. William even explained that the Fix Outlook mosaic was now on display in their hallway so the entire Office team can check it out.

William also mentioned that “improvements and changes in this area are something that the team is definitely considering for the future”. Only time will tell if Outlook will move towards better standards support, but this is certainly the strongest message on the subject we’ve had to date.

This is a brilliant result. Here’s the complete letter (emphasis ours).

I can’t thank William enough for not only ensuring our message is seen by the entire team, but for taking the time to let us know how much they appreciated our feedback.

To bring this great project to a close, we wanted to make sure the Outlook team had a constant reminder of just how strongly we all feel about their lack of standards support. Trending topics on Twitter come and go, we wanted something a little more permanent we could send their way.

The fixoutlook.org Mosaic

In his reply to the fixoutlook campaign, Microsoft’s William Kennedy told us that there “is no consensus” about what standards apply to email and that he’d work with the industry if a consensus arises. Luckily for us, these standards already exist. They’re called web standards.

To make sure William got the point, we figured we’d send him a “consensus” from 25,000 of us, many of who (myself included) are Outlook customers. From this idea, the fixoutlook.org mosaic was born. In a single image, it includes almost all of the 25,000 people who joined us in asking Microsoft to fix standards support in Outlook 2010.

Here’s a preview of the mosaic. You can click it for the full sized version, which is a rather large 20MB and might take a while to download.

We’ve used the different colored avatars from everyone who contributed to spell out a final message to Microsoft. We figured saying please this time couldn’t hurt our chances.

As I write this, the 2m x 1m mosaic is just boarding a plane on it’s way to Redmond, personally addressed to Mr Kennedy on behalf of everyone who contributed.

To give you an idea of scale, here’s a shot of us holding the mosaic.

A big final thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about the importance of the fixoutlook campaign. On a more personal note, it was a pleasure to be involved from start to finish, and hopefully it will contribute to making life easier for email designers and Outlook users alike.

Update: 17 July A few clever people have taken the mosaic to a whole new level creating zoomable versions you can easily move around in.

• The first is an AJAX-based version from Kyle Mulka.
• Here’s a fullscreen version using Deep Zoom from LobsterPot Solutions (requires Microsoft Silverlight). Make sure you zoom in about the “l” in fixoutlook to see a special message.
• The last one is also full screen and a slick combination of Deep Zoom on Colaab and also requires SilverLight.

It’s interesting to note that all 3 of these projects were built with Microsoft technology.

It’s also been fantastic to see William Kennedy, Corporate Vice President of the Office team respond so quickly to the community on the Outlook team blog. There are some positives to take away from the post, as well as a number of issues I think need further clarification.

“We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years.”

As outlined in our original post, we are in no way advocating that Microsoft shift from using Word to create or render HTML emails. We’re asking that the HTML produced by the Word engine be standards compliant. This in turn will ensure that the engine will correctly render standards-based emails.

“Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs...”

This is certainly music to our ears. The only problem is that “broadly adopted standards” already exist for HTML email. They are called web standards, and almost every email client on the market meets these standards. It doesn’t make sense to advocate a completely different set of standards to stipulate how HTML should be rendered in an email client as opposed to a web browser.

It’s important to remember the W3C’s CSS standard was created back in 1996. Not only that, but Outlook 2000 offered fantastic CSS support. The fact that software released 10 years later offers significantly less standards support does not reflect that Microsoft “understand that e-mail is about interoperability”.

If Microsoft is looking for a place to start, we’ve been advocating a list of recommendations the Outlook team should consider to meet an acceptable level of standards support since the release of Outlook 2007 two years ago.

“For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers.”

Every modern email client blocks scripting by default already. Our push for standards is not advocating support for anything other than the correct rendering of CSS. We agree that JavaScript has no place in an email client.

“The ‘Email Standards Project’ does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area.”

Sanctioned or not, we’ve had a great partnership with companies like Apple and Yahoo! who have been more than happy to work with us in improving their support for web standards in their own email clients. As for consensus, surely 20,000 individuals sending a unified message in less than 24 hours is something at least worth your consideration.

If you’re interested in more coverage and discussion of this important issue, here is a great place to start.

• Sour Outlook - zeldman.com


• Users Pressure Microsoft to Fix Outlook - Reuters


• Microsoft defends Outlook HTML decision - CNET News


• Microsoft: Outlook’s not broken and we aren’t ‘fixing’ it - ZDNet.com


• Outlook 2010 not winning fans. . .on Twitter - CNN.com

We’ll continue to keep you all in the loop as this develops, and you might also consider following our progress on Twitter at the just created twitter.com/fixoutlook.

Since that time, we’ve had the pleasure of working with teams at Yahoo!, Apple, IBM, Google and even the Microsoft Entourage team. However, the elephant in the room was always Outlook. For a time things were looking good and we had the chance to chat with a number of passionate Microsoft employees who agreed with our position on standards and to try their best to improve future versions of Outlook. I’m sad to say, it looks like these efforts failed.

After testing the latest beta of Outlook 2010 and seeing the same poor standards support as 2007, a senior member of the Outlook team confirmed they plan on continuing to use Word to render HTML emails. Not only that, but early tests indicate that HTML support in the Word engine has not been improved in any way. Same bugs. Same quirks.

To demonstrate just how bad the Word rendering engine is in Outlook 2010, here’s exactly the same email rendered in Outlook 2000, and then Outlook 2010. Click the image for a full sized version.

Microsoft explain their position

When Outlook 2007 was released there were lots of theories thrown around about what motivated the switch to the Word rendering engine. Many stipulated that it was a security related decision after the problems they’d been having with previous versions of Outlook. As it turns out, it was much simpler than that.

This was confirmed last week in a discussion with Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian. When asked why Outlook is using Word to compose HTML emails, this was his response:

“The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages.”

“I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective - at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience.”

When asked why Word is also used to render HTML emails, Dev explained:

“Having multiple HTML engines could reduce performance, as well as create an inconsistency in terms of what type of content the user is able to create vs. consume.”

Basically, Microsoft are using the Word rendering engine so emails composed in Outlook will look consistent when viewed by other Outlook users (also confirmed in this Microsoft white paper).

Email is not a walled garden

Microsoft’s decision to move away from the pre-2007 approach of using Internet Explorer to render emails clearly demonstrates they are not confident that emails composed using Word will render correctly in a web browser. Remember, for a second, that every other email client on the market today uses a web browser to render HTML email.

Surely Microsoft understand that if an Outlook 2010 user sends a Word formatted email to a friend using Apple Mail or Thunderbird and it’s unreadable, both sender and receiver suffer a poor experience. By aiming to please Outlook-to-Outlook senders, they are punishing Outlook customers who send to those using other email clients. Given the fact that Outlook 2007 only commands around 7% email client market share, it’s easy to see how short-sighted this is.

An obvious solution

To us, the solution couldn’t be more clear-cut. By updating the Word engine so it can compose and render standards based HTML, all of these problems are solved. Microsoft can have its pie and eat it too.

Outlook customers can receive email from outside sources without formatting problems. They can also rest assured that any emails they send to friends and colleagues not using Outlook will display as intended.

As the market upgrades from Outlook 2007 to 2010, HTML email design can move out of the pre-standards era of the 90’s bringing all the benefits that come with it.

Microsoft want your feedback on this decision

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and a year away from public release. Either we make it clear this is a bad decision now, or the disconnect between Outlook users and the rest of the email world will continue to grow. Email designers will be stuck building emails using the same clunky combination of tables for layout, inline CSS and font tags for many years to come.

Thankfully, Microsoft want to hear your feedback about this. From the Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian:

“The Office team, and Microsoft in general, is always open to and interested in customer feedback so we can prioritize the various needs of our diverse user base in product planning and development.”

“This conversation alone has reignited the topic within the Outlook and Word teams and in and of itself will contribute to future design considerations… We want to hear feedback on this position, and I’m sure you and your readers will provide it.”

It’s time for us to send the strongest message yet to Microsoft, and we need your help to get started. To make this happen, we’ve built fixoutlook.org.

All you have to do is tweet your thoughts about this issue, and make sure you include the fixoutlook.org URL somewhere in the tweet. We’ll be pulling together every tweet that includes this link on the fixoutlook.org site to send a unified message to Microsoft. The more tweets, the more impact, so please start spreading the word today and encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same.

To get started, head to fixoutlook.org for all the details.

We’re often asked for advice on how to get the best results given the current state of the email client market. Here’s our top picks to get you started with building an email that will work well for your readers right now. You’ll notice they are from Campaign Monitor, which is built by the same team that started the Email Standards Project (full disclosure achieved!).

Which CSS styles can I use in my emails?

Our email ACID test doesn’t cover everything, and it is more focused on individual, current clients. For the bigger picture see the Guide to CSS support in email clients (2008).

You may notice some differences, where support is spotty for certain elements and we’ve tested in different ways. Watch out for an expanded ACID test later this year to provide more clarity.

What are the best practices for designing emails?

For general advice on what to put into your emails, what not to, and how to approach it see the Email design guidelines.

Are there tested email layouts I can use?

To save time in working out a structure that does not fall apart in one of the popular email clients, you can start with free, tested email templates that you can take, modify and reuse.

Which email clients are people actually using?

At Campaign Monitor we’ve been collecting statistics from millions of emails sent out, and compiled an email client popularity report (the unsurprising news is that Outlook still dominates).

When you design and build an email you can’t know for sure which email client will be displaying it for any particular person. To find out the HTML and CSS rendering capabilities of mobile email clients, Gregg Oldring of Mailout Interactive took our email acid test and put it to work.

Gregg has posted his results on his blog and they are well worth checking out. He ran our acid test through a BlackBerry Bold, a BlackBerry Curve, a BlackBerry Pearl, an iPod Touch running the iPhone 2.1 Software Upgrade, an iPhone running 2.2 Software Upgrade, a Treo running Palm OS and a Treo running Windows.

Gregg’s results provide some interesting details - changes in rendering between iPhone software in 2.1 and 2.2 that actually break some parts of our test, for example. He also goes on to make a couple of suggestions for emailing to mobile clients, basically simplifying and reducing the width.

Make sure to click through and see the full mobile email results. Thanks Gregg for your work! If you’ve run your own tests, we’d love to hear about it, please comment below.

When we launched the Email Standards Project, we had a huge amount of support from people like you, web designers who were sick of having to deal with huge variations in the way their emails looked in the many different email clients. Although many people doubted that we could change things, we all felt something had to be done.

Since then, we have worked with worked with Yahoo! to improve their (already excellent) results, and talked to developers at Google about improving Gmail, and IBM about improving Lotus Notes.

It’s a slow process, but there is far more useful discussion of HTML email than there ever was before we started, and the signs are there for real change. We want to say thank you to all of you who have blogged about the project, contributed your own findings, spoken to contacts at email client developers, tweeted about us and more.

It is your efforts that have got us this far, and we’ll be relying on your help this year too. Here’s a quick outline of what we’ve got planned for 2009:

• Updated, more detailed email client testing — We’re going to extend our testing to cover more elements and design techniques. We’ll also look at adding other popular email clients. However, we’re still not going to test older versions, only the ones which have a chance of being updated.
• Projects to get attention from client developers — After our Gmail Grimaces got us in touch with a couple of Google engineers, we had lots of suggestions to do something similar for the Outlook team. We’ll search for ways to reach the right people.
• Open conversation with email program providers — As far as possible, we want to open up the conversation between designers of HTML emails, and email client providers. If we can understand each other better, we have more chance of things progressing.

In broad terms, those are the things we’ll be focusing on. Of course, we’ll continue to keep you up to date with changes in the email rendering landscape through this blog. If you have any suggestions, requests or questions, please leave them in the comments. You can also join our Facebook group to keep up to date.

Let’s make 2009 a good year for HTML email designers!

Thumbnail of the .Mac initial test

The much improved Mobile Me rendering

When we first tested .mac, it had a lot of problems. Our email ACID test did not render very well at all, and we ranked support overall as ‘Improvement Recommended’. This was slightly suprising given then excellent rendering abilities of the Mac desktop Mail client.

So after the release of the new Mobile Me, and after the associated outages and glitches, we were very keen to run the test again. The good news is that the results were dramatically improved. Nearly all of the previous problems had been corrected, and the email rendered almost perfectly.

Background colours and images are correct, positioning of elements works well, and even list images show up. The one oddity is what you can see in the thumbnail; headings. We found that while our H1 tag rendered perfectly, H2, H3 and below would not accept styling from a stylesheet in the head.

There’s no obvious explanation for why that would be the case, but during our testing and fiddling we were not able to get it to work at all. Lower level headings remained stubbornly unaffected by margins, background colors, padding and more.

Perhaps someone from the Mobile Me team can explain? Overall though, the rendering is hugely improved, and has earned an ‘Excellent’ rating. This is another great example of how webmail clients don’t need to render poorly.

Thanks to everyone who emailed us about Mobile Me, including Georg Stadler and Stefan Kremer who both sent in screengrabs.

View the full report for Mobile Me.

IBM has announced Lotus Notes for the iPhone will be released in 2008. According to the official site, it will “combine with the flexibility and connectivity of the Apple iPhone. To be built on the time tested IBM Lotus Domino Web Access infrastructure, users will be able to quickly access email, calendars, and contacts through the rich Apple iPhone user experience.”

The existing Apple Mail application built in to the iPhone does a very good job of rendering HTML and CSS, so we’ll be watching with interest to see how this new version of Notes does. If you have access to it, we’d love to hear from you once the product is released.

We've received a lot of requests for people to be able to test their own preferred email client, so here's your chance. Just add your email address (the one associated with the email client you want to test) to the list below, and we will send a copy of the ACID test to that address right away.

Please send me your email ACID test

We're always interested in hearing about email client support for HTML and CSS. In the future, we may well increase our official testing to include other clients too. Thanks again for your support of the Email Standards Project.