How does Microsoft Outlook 2007 affect email marketing programs?

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The big change in Microsoft Outlook is that the rendering engine for HTML emails moves from Microsoft Internet Explorer to Microsoft Word. As a result, it will also not support the following design elements that have been regularly utilized in email marketing designs in the past:

• Flash and animated GIFs
• Javascript and forms
• Background images
• Various CSS (cascading style sheets) properties

(A full list of what is supported is located here.)

Craig Spiezle, Microsoft's point man for coordinating the company's internet safety efforts including anti-spam and anti-phishing technologies, says Outlook 2007 improves formatting issues that occurred due to the previous use of two separate rendering engines: Internet Explorer for reading content and Microsoft Word for editing. The newest version eliminates that by using Word's new HTML rendering engine for both reading and editing. He also says the new Outlook "responds to the desires of consumers and provides them with added safety in the inbox."

While Microsoft's positioning of this as a major improvement for consumers and email marketers alike should surprise no one, some email marketing practitioners have very different views from Spiezle on what this does to the email marketing industry.

Stephanie Miller of email deliverability services company Return Path says, "Whatever the benefits offered by the Microsoft product team to subscribers, the changes to Outlook 2007 are not good news for email marketers. The decreased functionality for HTML due to the use of the crippled Microsoft Word rendering engine will cause messages that rendered just fine before to de-format or not display at all in Outlook 2007."

Chad White, who runs RetailEmail.Blogspot, a comprehensive blog that tracks email campaigns in the retail industry, and the retail advisor to the Email Experience Council, is bearish on the new Outlook changes as well, but reminds us that it is the B2C community that can collectively hold their breath... for now.

He says, "Outlook 2007 is certainly bad news for email marketing, particularly B2B marketers, since Outlook has a much higher penetration among businesses. B2C email marketers can bide their time because of the low usage of Outlook among consumers and the time it will take for adoption to ramp up."

Mark Brownlow, who publishes the authoritative and independent website EmailMarketingReports.com (and companion blog, an industry must read), sees the problems presented more as irritating issues than as full-blown disaster. He points out that many of the design elements affected were never being used consistently or supported by other email clients (think Flash).

Luc Vezina of email service provider GOT Corporation takes the glass-half-full approach as well and hopes that these Outlook changes may encourage designers to stick to simple HTML and, as a result, increase compatibility with a greater number of mail clients including those on handheld devices and cell phones. Either way, he says, email designers will have time to adapt as mass adoption of Outlook 2007 will not happen overnight.

Next: Outlook 2007 predictions