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The Scoop On Outlook 2007
January 31st, 2007 by Bronto Software
If you haven’t caught word already, then allow us to be the bearer of less-than-good news: Outlook 2007 is going to cause (minor, but curable) headaches for email marketers.
What’s happened?
Previous versions of Outlook used the Internet Explorer engine to render HTML emails. This allowed designers to employ sophisticated, CSS-based designs with predictable results: if the message looked fine in IE, then it would look fine in Outlook.
Instead of using the IE-based HTML rendering engine, Outlook 2007 will use the MS Word HTML rendering engine. (Seriously. We’re not joking.) Considering the inherent HTML rendering limitations of MS Word, this basically signals the end to many of the tricks that email designers rely on to create professional, appealing email designs.
For example, take a look at our recent Best Practices Webcast announcement in a Mac Mail email client.
Next, take a look at the same message in an Outlook 2007 email client. Yikes.
The good news is that these issues are solvable, so keep reading.
What will be different?
For a quick overview of the highlights, read below. (Note that many of these changes affect HTML-level elements in your email design.)
- No background images in DIV tags and TABLE cells.
- No nested background colors. A background color in a DIV or TABLE cell displays fine. However, if you nest another TABLE or DIV within the element, the background color vanishes.
- No FLOAT or POSITION attribute in DIV tags. In other words, CSS-based layouts won’t work in Outlook 2007. Tables only going forward.
- No FORM tags. Quite simply, embedded email surveys will not work in Outlook 2007. What’s even worse, Outlook 2007 actually strips out the form elements, so your recipients will not be able to tell if a form was there to begin with. (We suggest mitigating this with a “Problems with the survey? Complete it online.” link at the top of your message.)
- No animated .gif files or Flash content. Animated .gif files just won’t animate. With Flash, you’ll just get a big red X.
If you are a web designer, we suggest that you read the complete, sleep-inducing overview of the design conventions that will not be supported in Outlook 2007. Also, Microsoft has provided a downloadable validator that will help you validate your HTML for the Outlook 2007 engine.
What does this mean for me?
If none of that made sense, then you’re probably not a web designer. In which case, you need to know the following:
- Don’t panic. The whole world isn’t going to switch to Outlook 2007 overnight, thus, you have plenty of time to re-think and re-work your email design(s). Given that many of your recipients will migrate to Outlook 2007 over time, you and/or your designer should obviously take these restrictions into consideration going forward.
- Email design isn’t dead. These restrictions will not bring back the days of ASCII text in a telnet terminal. You’ll still be able to convey your brand and “design” in your email marketing communications, you just might have to jump through a few more hoops to get there.
- Some Bronto templates will need an overhaul. For those of you that use Bronto’s default templates, we’ve already identified those that we will need to re-design in order to adapt to these changes. We’ll get started with these soon, so stay tuned for an update.
- Test! It just wouldn’t be a post on the blog if we didn’t emphasize the importance of testing. We suggest that you download a free trial of Outlook 2007 and add it to your testing routine, if only to familiarize yourself with the differences.
As always, contact Bronto Support if you have any questions. We’re happy to help.
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timely post Eric. This might be a separate issue but I sent a message internally (not using Bronto but my Outlook)using bcc to about 500 internal addresses. It had a small image which linked to Bronto landing page. The guy who sits next to me is using Outlook 2007. He never saw the message - Outlook 2007 placed it in its spam filter. He has not changed any defaults - what do you think?
Typical! The downloadable validator is available ONLY as a windows download. Actually it specifies that “Windows Server 2003; Windows XP Service Pack 2″ are supported. Wonder if it works well in Vista as well. Probably, but their page needs updating.
Eric,
From an ISP perspective, I’m not sure the impact to residential users will be felt for quite a while. It seems like security suite applications would be a greater annoyance to rich email content goals.
Do you anticipate more email marketing to request users click out of their MUA to a URL to “Display this message” as intended?
-Jay
Jay.
Thanks for the comment.
I believe that you are correct in your assessment - this change will bring minimal initial impact to residential users, primarily because they typically use webmail interfaces or Outlook Express. Business users are the primary Outlook users and will therefore likely be the first to face these issues receiving mail.
This change certainly makes the “click here to read online” link a much more important piece of the email marketing message. However, I think that most marketers will respond with simplified designs that render properly and thus do not require a click away from the client.
Eric
This is a great post. People can still make their online version of their message as fancy as they want, provided IE7 recognizes your .css
Hi does this mean that background images wont work in TD cells?
Best regards and thanks
U
Hello Unicorn.
You are correct. As a result of these changes, background images will not work in TD cells.
Keep in mind that this is only for mail received in the Outlook 2007 email client.
Eric
hello all,
I am using outlook express 2007, I noticed the email template background images aren’t showing up in a template I created. How can I solve this background images problem?
I have made an email template, I tested in outlook 2003 and it’s working, but in 2007 the background images are not there. Please help!
Rizvan,
It’s good that you are testing in outlook 2007, that’s the first step. As Eric said in the blog post, background images aren’t going to work in tables or divs. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do some similar things. You should consider setting an appropriate background color for those tables or divs to ensure that the design degrades well within Outlook 2007. The email may look a little less colorful, but it should still be able to get your point across.
The long and short of it is that you need to stop using images as backgrounds for tables in your email designs. This may be hard for many companies who have relied heavily on that previously. Images can still be used within simple table layouts, so it’s not as if we have to ditch them altogether.
In case you don’t know how, here is some sample code to put inside your table definition to make use of a background image and degrade to a background color: style=”background: url(http://www.yoursite.com/images/background.gif);” bgcolor=”#DEF”
I hope that helps,
Adam
Hi everybody,
A week ago I’ve made my very first HTML-based marketing e-mail… I used dreamweaver, and placed a background image in a table, like everyone else does these days… I got some replies that the background doesn’t show when opening in Outlook… I’ve been reading all posts here but I can’t seem to find a solution for this problem… just setting my background to a color won’t work for me, because my background-image is a part of my concept… this table-background-image contains my actual background, logo’s, photographs, shadows, heads etc. The only content added in Dreamweaver is the white text and my links… so this mailing is giving quite an odd view if you can’t see the background…
you can view the webversion of my mailing when you clik here: http://www.stolly.be/opmaakbasis.html
Is there anyone with a good solution on how to display these kinds of mails on outlook the way they are intended?
Thanks a lot,
Kristof
Kristof,
I’m glad to hear that you’re venturing into the world of HTML email marketing. This brings you the ability to provide a rich, graphically pleasing experience to your customers. However, it also brings in a much higher burden in terms of content creation and testing. As Eric stated in the original blog post, the Outlook 2007 update removed the capability for background images in tables (and divs). They just don’t work in Outlook 2007. Period. End of story.
That doesn’t mean you’re out luck, but it does mean you have to do a bit more work. It also limits your options a bit in terms of presentation. You can still place images in tables, but rather than being background images, they need to be normal images. This means they can’t really have text overlapping them at all, unless that text is also part of the image.
Some marketers have gone the route of shorter emails that are entirely image based. This usually involves creating one big image and breaking it up into several smaller ones and placing appropriate alt tags. This runs the risk of being identified as spam because the image to text ratio is too high, so I wouldn’t really suggest going ALL images.
I would suggest breaking up those images, placing the key ones into tables for formatting (not as background images), and placing a nice background image in there that is purely cosmetic. You should also define a background color that is similar to the image, which will be for when images are off and for Outlook 2007.
This method allows you to provide the same type of well laid out stylistically appealing message to those who can display it, while still providing something comparably nice, and yet still effective, to those using Outlook 2007.
As a side note, I noticed that you had style placed in the head tag of your document (dreamweaver may have placed this there). This will be stripped out by many web mail clients. You should move all style declarations into the body of the message. Placing them inline with the actual tag that will use the style is the best method to ensure it is properly display.
I hope that helps, please feel free to let me know if you have any other questions.
-Adam
Product Manager at Bronto
I am so mad a MS!!! I am glad I found these posts, I thought I was going crazy. I created a beautiful email and the people I sent it to test could not see it. I also learned from this post about the style tags being put inline with the tag that will use it. Is there a way to do this in Dreamweaver automatically or do I need to do it manually??
Dreamweaver doesn’t have a tool to automatically do this, but here ( http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_styles.asp ) is a tutorial on the use of inline styles. There are some third party tools ( http://code.dunae.ca/premailer.web/ ) available outside of Dreamweaver that will perform the conversion for you, but I would recommend heavy testing across email clients as the conversion isn’t fool-proof. The best solution is to take the time to manually put the styles inline.
-Nick Cordell
Support Associate
Bronto Software
Thanks for your comments! I have been using a style sheet, is that ok?
Dreamweaver doesn’t have a tool to automatically do this, but here ( http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_styles.asp ) is a tutorial on the use of inline styles. There are some third party tools ( http://code.dunae.ca/premailer.web ) available outside of Dreamweaver that will perform the conversion for you, but I would recommend heavy testing across email clients as the conversion isn’t fool-proof. The best solution is to take the time to manually put the styles inline.