The worst news email marketers have heard in ages
Do you look back fondly on a time when the majority of email clients didn’t support CSS? Do you long for table-based layouts to be the only legitimate method you can ensure your message appears properly in everybody’s browser?
Have no fear. Microsoft, with their upcoming release of Outlook 2007, has transformed the email client from quirky but manageable with the IE6 rendering engine, to a giant thorn in my side, since 2007 will now use the Microsoft Word 2007 rendering engine.
Just a few of the luxuries we’ve been enjoying that will fast be methods of the past, seeing as Outlook has an estimated 70–80% of the corporate email market:
- no CSS background images
- no CSS positioning (this is iffy enough that I hardly used it anyways)
- incredibly poor support for margin & padding
- wonky support for nested div’s and things as simple as background colors set via CSS
- no animated GIFs
Apparently this is all being done under the ruse of security — even though IE7 is supposed to be the most secure version ever?
Check out the full list of what Outlook/Word 2007 supports straight from the horse’s mouth.
Thanks to SitePoint and David Greiner at Campaign Monitor for the disappointment and ruining my weekend. :)
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