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andi*pandi · Apr 19, 2007, 02:59 PM

I'm surprised there hasn't been a thread here on that... search came up blank.

I must have been under a rock because we've just been told we can no longer use CSS at all in html emails, since outlook 2007 was released around January. I've been googling to see if this is true, I can find microsoft's page that basically says they only support css1 in the new outlook with the Word 2007 rendering. However my clients are panicked and don't want to allow css at all. My emails have been using tables for layout and inline styles and have been tested and work in other email apps (no float or positioning tags). I don't have 2007 yet though so I don't know if my emails would work. The plugin microsoft is recommending for testing is an exe.

Before I trash my workflow, does anyone else have any experience with outlook 2007 they'd like to share?

besson3c · Apr 19, 2007, 04:02 PM

Are your inline styles simply text formatting? If so, if Outlook 2007 indeed only supports CSS 1, this should work, no?

andi*pandi · Apr 19, 2007, 04:13 PM

for the most part just text formatting, background color, some padding/margin. I think it should be fine, but I'm being told NO TEH CSS IS BAD ACCUCAST SAID SO! etc. And without something to test against, I don't have any backing to support my thought.

I did find someone in the building who is "testing" the new version, so that's something.

besson3c · Apr 19, 2007, 04:33 PM

Originally Posted by andi*pandi

for the most part just text formatting, background color, some padding/margin. I think it should be fine, but I'm being told NO TEH CSS IS BAD ACCUCAST SAID SO! etc. And without something to test against, I don't have any backing to support my thought.

I did find someone in the building who is "testing" the new version, so that's something.

Do you have access to a PC or an Intel based Mac where you can setup an Outlook test environment using VMWare or something?

andi*pandi · Apr 20, 2007, 08:00 PM

I have a PC, but am not allowed to install software on it (password denied type of thing). I put in a request to have Outlook 2007 installed, and the SST guy called back wondering why I needed it. I explained, and he said they were still testing it and I should report any problems customers/recipients report to him. When I said I'd rather test it before annoying all our mailing list, and I didn't want to send a helpdesk request each time I tested an email, he grudgingly admitted that made more sense.

Oy. This will turn into a kerfuffle.

besson3c · Apr 20, 2007, 09:07 PM

Kerfuffle. I like that word.

Ozmodiar · Apr 30, 2007, 12:59 AM

Yes, Outlook 2007 has become a major headache for HTML e-mail. You can still lay everything out in tables with inline CSS, but there are a lot of things it gets wrong. Microsoft has a list of supported CSS on their site somewhere, but my experience has been pretty hit or miss.

There is no longer support for positioning or background images, but you can still "float" images with the align attribute. Also, make sure you explicitly set the width and height of the image in your code or it may render as a disproportionate thumbnail in Outlook. I haven't been able to correlate anything to when Outlook decides not to load the image at its natural width and height, it just seems to randomly do it when it wants.

Another piece of advice is not to rely on padding and line-height styles. <br /> tags seem to be more reliable if you're trying to get padding above or below content. It seems to do ok with padding-left and padding-right, though.

elppa · May 27, 2007, 02:30 PM

Why can't MS just stick the IE7 engine in Outlook to render HTML email?

It would make sense surely?

Mithras · May 28, 2007, 12:08 PM

^^ Because of the security risk. They've been beaten over the head with what a bad idea that is, so they're sticking to very, very simple HTML. It's the right move, in my opinion.

besson3c · May 28, 2007, 12:13 PM

Originally Posted by Mithras

^^ Because of the security risk. They've been beaten over the head with what a bad idea that is, so they're sticking to very, very simple HTML. It's the right move, in my opinion.

If they could strip out the Active X stuff from IE 7 so that there was no bridge into the user's system and all it did was render HTML (perhaps offering to block images from loading like Thunderbird does), it would probably be fine...

I suspect that this would be difficult to do though.

elppa · May 28, 2007, 03:50 PM

How come webkit can be transplanted into any app going, from RealPlayer to TextMate to Mail then? Surely similar (theoretical) security problems?

besson3c · May 28, 2007, 04:06 PM

Originally Posted by elppa

How come webkit can be transplanted into any app going, from RealPlayer to TextMate to Mail then? Surely similar (theoretical) security problems?

No ActiveX, the same reason why Firefox is a much more secure choice in Windows.

Catfish_Man · May 29, 2007, 05:11 PM

Originally Posted by elppa

How come webkit can be transplanted into any app going, from RealPlayer to TextMate to Mail then? Surely similar (theoretical) security problems?

Certainly any security holes found in webkit will apply to apps that use it. At least Safari's track record is a lot better than IE...

Thinine · May 30, 2007, 03:24 AM

Any security holes in Word's HTML engine will be transplanted to Outlook now, so I'm not sure how much better this will be. Really it just makes for even worse CSS support from MS.

Ozmodiar · Jun 3, 2007, 03:40 AM

Microsoft's reason for changing the rendering engine in Outlook 2007 is that Outlook has always used Word for creating HTML e-mails, so they wanted the same engine to display them. I'm not sure any official MS documentation has ever mentioned security as the reason for switching.