The Latest Outlook Makes E-mail Marketers Unhappy

E-mail marketers are far from happy about the latest release of Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail client, due to be released later this year. Despite its legendary user unfriendliness, Outlook is one of the most widely-used programs for sending and receiving e-mail, so any change in its programming has an impact on the design of e-mail marketing messages. This time those impacts are significant. Where all earlier versions of Outlook have used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to interpret and present HTML e-mails, the new Outlook will use Microsoft’s Word to do the HTML processing.

That is real cause for concern since in the past Word has had a very clunky and inefficient approach to HTML. Such e-mails typically use a system called Cascading Style sheets or CSS to make the representation of fonts, colours, and images efficient and consistent. A style sheet is essentially a short-cut reference menu where you define a style once (e.g. large headlines are always 14 point Verdana font in orange, left aligned, with specific spacing attributes and so on) that saves you from having to repetitiously write out big chunks of code every time you want to format a frequently occurring component.

Most e-mail programs can accommodate CSS as typically used: either in a complete set of specifications at the top of a message in the hidden header code, or as individual instructions imbedded in the body of the message. The latest Outlook cannot handle that.

Online security is a big and still rapidly growing issue, and one of the penetration vehicles most frequently used by virus designers and hackers is e-mail, particularly HTML. In what appears to be an attempt by Microsoft to pump up the security of HTML e-mail processing, they have reduced the flexibility (and therefore creativity) that e-mail message designers have enjoyed for years.

The reduced flexibility of Outlook 2007 means that HTML designers are going to have to do a lot more coding to get messages to look the way they want them to. And since commonly-used elements such as Flash and animated gifs will simply be removed by the new Outlook, the creative design process will have to be revamped. Outlook 2007 will force designers to go back to techniques long since abandoned, such as using tables to lay out text. It also means that the templates being used by everyone from newsletter senders to legitimate marketing communicators will have to be re-thought and thoroughly tested.