25
Jun
New version of Outlook, and why it is going to break your emails
Update 1: (11 July 2009)
Microsoft product manager Dev Balasubramanian has posted a very formal reply, essentially telling everyone that they’re not going to change their stance on this. Of course, as opposed to actually listening to the overwhelming number of opposition to their plan in the comments above, it makes better sense to hide in your self-dug hole of complacency.
Original article:
Stay with me while I run through the technical stuff. Currently, all the nicely formatted emails you receive are all generated to follow a specification called HTML 3.2. When you open these emails in your email reader (be it Outlook, Thunderbird, or web mail), an engine reads the specially crafted document, and then renders your nicely formatted message for your viewing pleasure.
The problem is, some rendering engines do a decent job on displaying your messages, while others make the carefully made messages look like a blotched mess. Of course, I’m talking about Microsoft Outlook 2010. It’s part of the upcoming version of Office, and the rendering prowess of the engine used sucks to the core. In fact, that engine has been behind some of the most bloated and ugly messages you’ve seen on the web so far (if you have email contacts who use Outlook 2007), and it’s now poised to be the default rendering engine for Outlook 2010. This means that all your emails are going to look like the same crap your Outlook 2007 contacts have been stuck sending to you.
Look at a sample to see the horror to be unleashed if you, or your company IT department decides to upgrade to this monstrosity.
A website has been setup to campaign for Microsoft to regain some common sense. As the IE8 team has always trumpeted about, Internet Explorer isn’t that bad a renderer. Why don’t they use it for viewing emails? It’s as simple as that.
Now’s decision point. If you want all emails to your corporate email address to look like a mess, do absolutely nothing. Or else, you need to get your butt off right now and warn your IT department about this terrible program.
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