Those Poor Outlook Users

I’m not here to slander Microsoft Office; I use Microsoft components on a daily basis. However, as a web developer, I must say that I feel sorry those who use Outlook 2007 for their primary emailing program or plan to when Outlook 2010 is available. Those users may not see the emails as they were intended, simply because Outlook won’t read the code the same way. This is especially true of marketing emails. 

If you have not seen what Outlook 2007 or the new Outlook 2010 does to marketing emails that were not built in a word platform, take a look at this beautifully illustrated example in an Email Standards Project blog.

As someone who designs marketing emails on a regular basis, part of my job is making sure that our emails look the same in all email clients. This is quite a difficult task when the majority of email clients are able to handle HTML code with no problem, and then Outlook users might get an email that looks misaligned and with no styling, whatsoever. But, we manage to handle it with tables and thousands of in-line styles, all in the hope that someday just beyond the horizon there would be reprieve from this and we will be able to leave those unnecessary tags behind.

Today is not that day.  We will continue to code and test especially for Outlook formatting for at least a few more years.

And the sad part is; it’s the users who are suffering with inconsistent experiences.