I'm very familiar with Internet Explorer 6, my incompetent coworker who refuses to see things my way and his underrated friend in annoyance, Internet Explorer 7. IE7 for the most part does a good job but then will do something illogical like order the files by how much he likes their colours. I coexisted with these two thinking it couldn't get much worse and then I met their third friend, Outlook '07. With a primary school education and a habit of stapling random things to his face, he makes Internet Explorer look like employee of the month.

When I first started testing our new version of eNews for release I didn't quite see what was coming. I knew that Outlook had tragically little CSS support and needed tables, which was fine, but I hadn't really been paying attention and didn't realize how Outlook rendered the emails. I knew that programs like Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage used Webkit and Thunderbird used Gecko. Makes sense that the rendering engine for email applications would be the same ones used for the various browsers out there, especially with the growing HTML email marketing industry. However Microsoft's Outlook team failed to surprise me once again by doing something completely illogical and using the Word rendering engine.

The Word rendering engine is a special kind of engine. Not only does it offer little in support of CSS, it's full of weirdness and bugs that nobody decided to fix in Word. I would almost okay with it's primitive method of rendering if it was in any way solid and correct. If you're going to do old school and basic, at least do it well.

So what does this mean for you? If you're a designer creating an email template it means tables, it means boxy, it means simple. Luckily a little bit of branding in a header image and some nice basic text padding and formatting goes a long way with email campaigns. No background images and careful with the background colours, there is a certain bug which effects background colours and nested divs and tables. Old school web designers might remember this one from back in the day and no, they haven't fixed it. More things to avoid are styled lists, fancy margin/padding work, and there is a possibility that your email template will look slightly different in each email application.

For us folk that handle the back end as well it means using tables everywhere, to contain content and to contain the whole enews. Divs cannot be assigned widths, they will always go 100% so you will need tables to contain anything that needs sizing. You will also need to use padding and margins in weird and inefficient ways to get your text and elements positioned and all this code will need to be inline. For a more detailed report of what Word will handle Microsoft made this handy chart that is mildly hard to decifer and kind of feels like a giant middle finger gesture. It does come in handy regardless:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx

If you're one of the lucky Smallbox eNews users you should be comforted by the fact that I'm one of the lucky few that gets to do all this for you. We have a template down and the teeth grinding is settling down somewhat. You'll also be happy to know that due to these Outlook handicaps we've just gone ahead and made our eNews webmail compatible too. Webmail is completely bare, strict and inline as well, however the reason why I'm grumpy with Outlook and not Gmail is that Gmail is solid, predictable and doesn't seem to have any bugs so far.

I am on the edge of my seat waiting for Outlook '08 or '09 or Outlook Panorama to come out but it may be quite a few years realistically. The web design community is holding their breath that they'll go back to using Internet Explorer (that's right, we yearn for them to use IE) and won't move onto using something like Paint to render their emails. Thanks to Outlook '07 and many of Microsofts decisions in the past I wouldn't be surprised.