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While designing I found that creating e-mails that are compatible with various e-mail programs can be difficult to decifer what one program to the next will do. After several days of trying different scenarious of possibilities, I found that extensive amounts of time and testing has gone into determining what different e-mail programs end results will be produced. At one point I thought I had it licked, but then I decided to forward a message to various e-mail programs and found there were some vaviations between the messages after being forwarded.

It has come to my attention that not all e-mail programs treat the rendering of messages the same. It took careful and time consuming testing to come up with a format that works well between all e-mail programs. Granted they all don't appear the same, but I found a suitable format for all programs, even after forwarding the messages. Something it boils down to is how complicated are the messages being created when designing. An example of what I mean is this.

I started my first e-mail message by designing it with <div> tag, but I quickly realized that not all e-mail programs with allow you to use CSS to load images. This is how I determined that it is best to use the <img> tag when creating e-mail messages. Now, although it is impossible to test my messages in all e-mail programs, I came to a solution with the most popular e-mail programs such as Yahoo, Outlook, Smarter Mail, and MSN.

I use outlook express ( I have full outlook but do not use) Like mobile phones which I do not use for anything but phone calls.I use outlook for sending emails in plain text with pictures & or word documents attached when required. using any type of mark-up html in emails slows them down in loading and it is possible to add virus code.
Most junk mail has flashy html code so the only people loosing out will be the junk mail senders. 2010 version will not make any difference to me as I just use outlook to send and receive mail!

Hypertext was meant for web pages. When you write a letter, do you use extensive mark-up? No? Then why do you suddenly need to do so when writing an electronic letter?

If HTML never found its way to e-mail Outlook, Outlook would've been a lot safer years ago. I'm glad to see Microsoft finally starting to get smart about security.

Since when did Microsoft care about quality or what users want?

Their products are almost all full of bugs. They are STILL vulnerable to the many thousands of viruses. They use excessive amounts of memory and disk space, etc

While MS can get people to pay excessive prices then get them to pay again and again for bug fixes that cause more bugs why would they care?

Most people use Windoze just because other people use Windoze, not because the product is any good.

Quit complaining and come up with a better mousetrap!

SEO
Cincinnati

No, Its bad personal security

I use Thunderbird so couldn't care less whether that piece of cr*p Outlook renders HTML correctly or not.

You can actually create html emails that work in outlook with css and background images... yes you need to use tables but what does it really matter?.. I've been doing this for ages, if you search around good enough you'll find the solutions..

I do not currently have any of these issues i get all my emails as i should. Granted i have to allow pictures sometimes. I do think that once you have IE installed and updated, at least has been the case for me and my clients, we never really experienced this issue.

The fact that some people do get weirdly rendered emails, well there is nothing that can be done, it happens with my yahoo and hotmail accounts too, many emails render weirdly, like most things, the person creating and deploying have to know what they are doing.

Personally I love outlook and web access to web outlook, as well as its sync with windows mobile. Never had issued, just use it correctly and it always works correctly :)

I do like MS.

Microsoft will not adhere to standards for several reasons:
1. Only Microsoft clients can interoperate.
2. Sending email using any other client swill create broken HTML preventing GMail, Yahoo!Mail, other web clients as well thick clients from sending HTML emails.
3. Most people use HTML email without knowing it.
4. Many people also use Word email without knowing it. They use pretty Word formatting, etc. which gets lost when the email is read by another non Microsoft Mail client.

Only way they will back off will be anti-trust.

What would your standard non-techie do when things don't interoperate? They will want the Microsoft Office Suite to get on with their work. Any business will eat that cost. Microsoft benefits.

I still remember the Winmail.dat format. For years Microsoft would not release the details of the format. One had to work very hard to prevent it from getting generated.

Using Word: I am also worried about using Word for composing email. Think about compatibility issues there.

All in all, MS believes they own the space and any one entering is seen as a threat.

I wonder if Outlook Express and Hotmail and their derivatives (Windows Live/ MS Live, etc.) will be able to interpret the HTML email.

In that case, one may have a legal case against MS: they have to disclose the api (including the behavioral aspects) or run into anti-trust issues because they tied the platform to the application.

The best place to try case will be in Europe, US being a pushover.

why bother even spending 30 seconds telling MS to fix the html rendering engine in Outlook ?
Use something else !