This link went around the office a few days ago about the rendering engine used to display HTML email messages in Outlook 2007. Evidently, the folks from Campaign Monitor are not impressed.

The issue is that Outlook 2007 uses Word to render the HTML email messages instead of Internet Explorer. This leads to some limitations on the HTML and CSS that authors can use in their message.

Zeyad Rajabi and Erika Ehrili wrote this document to help folks understand the rendering capabilities of the Outlook 2007 email client. Its well done and easy to understand.

It looks like a fair number of people are in a tizzy over this. If you make a large percentage of your revenue by designing complex email templates for your marketing clients, you're probably interested in how the email renders in the reader's email client program. Just thinking about the number of email client programs is startling. That's a lot of testing to do before you send out your mass e-mail message. Plus, you have to comply with the federal anti-spam laws. I suppose the marketing folks deserve a little bit of a hassle for all of their networking events and schmooze fests...

I like a pretty e-mail as much as the next person, provided that its relevant to my interests. I don't like the crippling affects that I see when one is forwarded to me by the original recipient. It seems to me that the message needs to be short, with a clear call to action, and trackable. I'm fine with a details link to a web page.

These are some of the choice excerpts from the comments on the Campaign Monitor page:

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jaw - floor.... Where is the frick'n sense in this? Is it 'cuz they didn't employ people who can understand CSS?? WTF??!!

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Hey there... I guess this is attrubuted to Vista's. IE has been split from the windows shell thus meaning that if IE is not installed on the computer Internet Explorer cannot render the HTML. See when you are in XP if you type in a url in Explorer it will go to the page "inplace" however if you open up Vista and try to put in the URL windows will open up your default browser to open the page. :)

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I like it. I've gotten emails from clients using the background images just b/c they look "pretty" and it ends up destroying the message formatting when I try to reply. Also, it's less junk taking up bandwidth. If you need graphical pretty things sent to specific people, find another way.

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Hate to be a spoiler, but I long for the days when my email didn't look like a webpage.

Email should be fast and efficient.

Graphical email is not.

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I'm no fan of using the Word rendering engine, but the real problem lies in the overuse of HTML mail. Anyone who doesn't use Outlook already has problems similar to the ones this switch will cause, and there are only two ways to ensure perfect rendering; Use plain text for emails, and use PDFs for pizazz.

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I'm almost positive it has to do with the whole Anti-Trust issue. The answer that would make the most sense to me would be the word rendering engine is part of Office. IE is not and therefore instigate the issue that people are being forced to upgrade and use IE versus alternatives. I think its a step in the right direction but i believe that it has hindered the users experiance because of it. Only time will tell if they stick to their guns and give some resolution on it.

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I think this is a great move. I'm sick and tired of html email and hopefully this will reduce the number of people that think its cool to put html, background images, and all that other crap in an email.

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Currently using Vista and Office 2007 and I do not see these problems problems. I even make HTML based newsletters an I have do do not changes to the way i create them. It looks like FUD to me.

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stop crying... BUY A MAC!!!

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Hey, maybe now we can get email back to what it's supposed to be. Text-based. HTML email has always been problematic and you've never been really sure about what the other person would see depending on their email client.

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Let's talk a little bit about spamminess, and why HTML might not be the way to go in email.

We run SpamAssassin, a requirement when each email account averages 150+ spam messages per day.

HTML is already suspicious and gets -10 -- -40 if HTML only. Since -50 is quarantine, your beautifully crafted HTML only message is precariously close to deletion already.

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I had a need for a client services teammate to get their hands dirty with some XML. In this project, an XML file defines the hierarchy of pages in a web site. With a massive redesign under way, the team needed someone with familiarity of the existing pages to make the changes. With the hopes of giving my non-developer teammate a slick application to help them rearrange some angle brackets, I took a look at Xml Notepad 2007 and WCMHelp's XmlPad.

Xml Notepad 2007

The bits can be downloaded here and this document a nice explanation of the author's intent.

The left window shows the tree. The red dots are attributes and the folder icons are elements. The right window shows the values of the attributes. There's an XSL tab for viewing transformations. You can point the application at an XSLT file and see the output too.

The part I like the best about this is application is its simplicity. I need my teammate to look at each node and make a determination. They might need to move it anywhere in the hierarchy. There are four buttons on the right side of the toolbar expressly for this purpose. If they feel a little more ambitious, they can click and drag the node to the new location in the left window.

WMHelp XMLPad 3

You can get the bits here. This application feels a little more powerful than the first application. It can create schemas and validate against them in a more flexible manner than XML Notepad.

The attribute names and values appear in the lower left window of this application. There are different views of the XML available too. The picture above shows the source view. There are three other views (Grid, Table and Preview) in the bottom of the right window.

This application doesn't show the simple set of buttons in the toolbar for moving nodes, although they can be dragged around in the tree. I find that dragging can be a little unpredictable with a large node set. With all the on-the-spot decision making going on, I felt that the simple XML Notepad program was better suited for the specific task and user. However, if I'm the one doing XML work, I would probably choose XMLPad if VS.Net 2005 didn't do the trick for some reason.

At some point, I'd like to checkout XMLSpy. I've heard great things about it for years. I chose to examine these two because they were free and this was a one time gig. If I end up doing lots of work with my angle bracket hammer, then I probably will put in a request for the XMLSpy license.

Thanks Jim! Here I am wasting time on my first day back at work after the holiday break, and apparently, you are too. Here are 5 things you don't know about me.

1. I played varsity basketball my freshman year in highschool, much to the delight of the upperclassmen, and I was the MVP my senior year.
2. As a future software developer, I earned my obligatory black belt during college by training in Ryukyu Kempo karate with Bill Burch, good friends with George Dillman. I met some of the best friends I ever had.
3. At my first 4-H show, I received a red ribbon for my two chickens. I think I was eight.
4. I visited the Blue Hole in Belize with the charming woman I would later marry. We met about 50 sharks, between 6 to 10 feet in length, as they came out of the deep blue center to greet us at a depth of 140ft along the rim. She squeezed my hand very tightly and I knew it was love from then on.
5. During the glorious late '90s I bought a red 1994 Corvette when I had absolutely no business doing so. My wife says she dated me in spite of that car. Boy, that car was sweet.

Here are my five victims of this game: Kelly, Scott, Happy Steve, Lee, and Dave.