Jun
29
Microsoft Responds to FixOutlook.org Twitter Campaign
As I reported last week, there is a Twitter campaign in progress that is attempting to change the way Outlook 2010 renders html emails. FixOutlook.org currently shows that over 23,000 people have tweeted their web address while trying to bring the problems with Outlook to light. Microsoft has since responded to this campaign in a blog post on the Outlook Team Blog.
The author of this post, William Kennedy (Corporate VP), basically dismisses FixOutlook.org by saying how great Word is at composing emails. He goes on to confirm Outlook 2010 will use Word to create new emails and render received emails, just like Outlook 2007 does. William also mentions that “there is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability.”
This may be true in a technical sense (there is no “official” email standards document), but every other email program uses a web browser to render received emails. It was decided long ago that html would be the language of email, so it only makes sense to render them in a web browser. Yet, Microsoft is insisting on using Word to render email messages. It just boggles the mind.
If you scroll down past this Outlook blog post, you will see hundreds of comments ranging from frustrated pleas from email designers to downright hate speech against Microsoft. While sifting through these comments, I didn’t see a single one that took Microsoft’s position on this issue.
It seems that most people don’t care what Microsoft uses to compose emails in Outlook. What matters is how Outlook renders them. When you design an email newsletter, or even a formatted html email with a signature, you want it to show up the same to everyone you send it to, regardless of what email client they are using. This is pretty much true with every email client out there, except Outlook 2007 and now 2010.
Why Microsoft insists on sticking to Word in Outlook 2010 is beyond me, but maybe you can figure it out from their official response to this issue. Let’s hope this issue is not dead, and someone at Microsoft will listen to the tens of thousands of people out there that have weighed in on this issue. However, judging from their stubbornness at adopting standards with Internet Explorer, I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.
