Outlook is Broken

by Jonathan Longnecker

Fixoutlook.org is a fabulous initiative from our Design Hope sponsors Campaign Monitor and Newism. It sucked bad enough when Microsoft decided to use Word to render HTML emails in Outlook 2007. With one fell swoop they took email designs back 7 years. Now they’re saying Outlook 2010 will do the same. In fact they’re not even going to change the rendering engine at all. It *barely* supports tables, no CSS position and has mounds of bugs and quirks. All to say, if you thought Internet Explorer was the bane of your existence, you haven’t tried designing and coding an HTML email for Outlook. IE’s a walk in the park compared to this. Need a visual?

(Discussion on Flickr)

The good news is that Outlook 2010 is still in beta for a year and Microsoft says they’re open to feedback. So we need your help. First of all, go check out fixoutlook.org. It’s simple, beautiful and powerful. Hats off to Newism for the great design work. The wall of moving tweets is pretty awesome. We’ve already passed 10,000 tweets to Microsoft and Outlook 2010 is the #1 trending topic so let’s keep the momentum going. Designers Unite! Go visit fixoutlook.org and tweet away.