New Outlook Won't Use IE To Render HTML

loconet writes to tell us about a little surprise coming in Outlook 2007: it will render HTML email using the MS Word engine, dropping the use of IE for this purpose. This represents a body-check to the movement towards Web standards. Whatever you think about HTML email, lots of it gets generated, and those generating it won't be able to use CSS any more, and may stop pushing for more widespread standards support. The announcement was made on MSDN. From the Campaign Monitor post: "Imagine for a second that the new version of IE7 killed off the majority of CSS support and only allowed table based layouts. The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that's exactly what the new version of Outlook does to email designers."

email designers?

[tepples]

But why should the job title "e-mail designer" even exist? Why does e-mail even need design? The point is to get in, communicate, and get out. Making the presentation of this communication unusually attractive is for PDFs and for advertisements.

No Shit? Never Did...

[Anonymous Coward]

It has ALWAYS used Word to render the HTML.

And if it DID change from this to IE, the geeks would be complaining the same -- because IE is a lot more tied to the system than Word.

Beyond this, the items that don't get rendered are good things -- for *EMAIL*.

I don't want someone being able to play with images too much. I don't want messages sent to me fucking with the positions. I don't want Javascript running in my email. I don't want forms that could potentially read the rest of my inbox available (if the JS were activated that geeks are getting up in arms about).

Almost everything that Word doesn't do are features I don't want my email reader to do.

Then again, I read my mail in plain text. I don't use Windows, I'm on a Mac right now using Foxfire (I don't like safari). My business lives off of BSD and Linux for our servers. And fucking shit...I'm having to defend Microsoft on this.

HTML email

[mobby_6kl]

is the tool of the devil! Maybe this would finally kill it off completely, and as another benefit, it won't be vulnerable to IE exploits.

Good Thing

[kschawel]

Isn't this a good thing? Exploits in the IE engine will not be able to be exploited through email. IMHO, emails should be text based with little formatting and the CSS and image heavy content should be on a web page. I know that people will disagree with me, but I believe it is a good thing.

Keith

Re:email designers?

[John Courtland]

The place I work for started releasing HTML emails highlighting deals for products, new features, and what not a few months ago, and the response has been nothing but positive. People like the pretty design and they reacted well to it. Not everyone is a minimalist who just wants just plain text, a lot of people want a whole dolled-up presentation.

Bad Thing

[khasim]

Now Microsoft will have TWO HTML renderers to debug and maintain. They had enough trouble with one.

Now we'll see exploits for IE and exploits for Outlook's renderer.

They've made the rendering part of the OS. If you cannot replace it with a different one, at least all of their apps should rely upon the same, built-in, OS functionality.

Re:email designers?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Using the same standard [for e-mail] for that is used for webpages makes a vast amount of sense.

No, it doesn't, for several reasons.

For a start, e-mail is a push medium, while the web is a pull medium. I am unlikely to accidentally receive a huge web page containing nothing but junk advertising by mistake; the closest you get is an e-commerce or review site that contains lots of banner ads. I am unlikely to accidentally receive a web page full of porn, or other material that may not be legal in my jurisdiction. If a web page is bloated and takes ages to load over a 56K modem (don't make the mistake of thinking everyone has high-speed Internet access; we are far from there yet) then I can stop it and go somewhere else, while most people don't know how to configure their e-mail client to ignore big spam mails and get to the important stuff.

Next up, about 99.999% of the web using public use a fully graphical browser (source: my backside). In contrast, a very significant proportion of e-mail users have text-only mail clients. This includes many in the academic community, increasing numbers of people who read e-mail on devices other than a desktop or laptop computer with a big screen, etc.

There are several other issues as well, but I think either of those alone is enough to refute your point. As a third and final point for now, not everyone uses Outlook to read mail, not by a long shot. If Microsoft play chicken here, I think they'll lose this one, just as Firefox tends to lose the standards argument with any non-geek who finds his bank/cinema/local shop web site doesn't render properly. "But it works with $POPULAR_ALTERNATIVE!" they will cry, as they wonder what this rubbish software on their computer is doing there and why stuff used to work and is now broken.

Letter To All Email Designers

[CdBee]

Dear Sir,

Go Fück Yourself. Your profession is responsible for designing all the corporate spam I receive, therefore you deserve this red-hot poker up your årse

Best wishes
C

It's about storage space.

[khasim]

A single 500KB message is not a problem.

I have over 10,000 messages in my mail box. Now you can see the problem? And I'm just one person. On a network, this can quickly become a major issue.

Think of the problem with 1,000 employees, with 5,000-10,000 messages each at a company.

Not to mention that spammers love this because they can get this past the spam filters very easily.

Word isn't ...

[Falladir]

Why not use Frontpage [microsoft.com] Expression Web or Sharepoint? Oh, are they not included in Office [microsoft.com]? This can't be for real. I'm appalled that Word doesn't support CSS, but if MS really plans to use an HTML renderer that is so far from being standards-compliant for Office, how can they hope to be competitive? (yes, I agree that HTML mail is silly and bloated, but many people still like it on some level)

Re:It's about storage space.

[PopeRatzo]

I loathe these "web-page" emails. I'm trying to think of a single one of them that's ever been of use to me or gave me pleasure.

If you want me to see a web page, please send me a URL in the email. Give me the choice.

Please.

I'm thinking that there might be enough crap getting sent through email that if people just did the right thing and left the fancy visuals to web pages, we might not have some of the bandwidth issues we're having. Now obviously, video and audio and torrents are the main hogs, but the junk mail can't be helping matters. And I seriously cannot recall a single of these web-page emails that was anything but junk to me.

Oh, great...

[ConceptJunkie]

The only MS software that could be worse than IE has got to be Word, which is the most horrible piece of software ever written by man (given that Lotus Notes was written by some kind of invertebrate). This is lovely, the new Outlook will take 2 minutes to start, and crash while you're writing a message, and autorecover won't work, and you'll spend 30 minutes trying to get autonumber to work.

Good thing I've been using Thunderbird for 3 years.

Re:It's about storage space.

[Short Circuit]

As the other guy said, don't forget to count the number of users. A business network might have anywhere from 100 to 10,000 email users. An ISP with a webmail interface could have millions.

And, yes, some of us still use dial-up. Not everyone lives in a densly-populated area, even in the Western world.

Re:It's about storage space.

[aachrisg]

yeah, and each of those users is getting paid more in one hour than it costs to store their email. In the ISP case, each of those users is paying way more in one month than the storage costs to hold their mail, even using the inflated numbers posted.

Re:It's about storage space.

[petermgreen]

yes marketers are paid to be annoying attention seeking bastards.

worse still they tend to do it from behind the cloak of those they work for so noone can make thier lives hell in return.

Re:It's about storage space.

[stapedium]

The cost of the drives isn't that bad, but you have to reliably get those drives on a network and keep them backed up. This means servers, redundancy, backup tapes, and electric bills. These are the real costs of storage space.

Re:Gmail

[Mistlefoot]

Are you implying that FREE Gmail will be run using the same constraints as my $500 per copy Office suite?

Nice.

The saying "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" comes to mind. I'm buying a horse, and the most expensive horse on the average users markets and I'm looking at the teeth very thoroughly.

Re:email designers?

[Slur]

Well, it would make sense to move towards XML for all its useful qualities:

  * A simple, open standard
  * Conveniently human-readable
  * Platform Agnostic - unknown tags and attributes can be ignored
  * Data Includes clear type information

The HTML / XHTML / CSS rendering engines are powerful things. They provide a worthy layout system, which is what some email calls-for, and in the case of XHTML/CSS it provides a means to distribute information in a human- and machine-readable way that includes rich contextual information. Most importantly, it's a simple open standard that any application can adopt, and it avoids duplication of effort for the purpose of device-agnostic layout.

Microsoft is making a blunder by doing this. It's an echo of their days of trying to knock down Netscape by leveraging their platform. They are now trying to do the same thing to open standards. As a monopoly, you might argue that Microsoft is using their monopoly position to lock out a viable competitor. Standards represent something analogous to software, and having a monopoly on standards is not different than having a monopoly on software.

If the case were clearer, maybe the EFF would take it up.

Re:It's about storage space.

[cevnet]

User choice has nothing to do with it. Heck, the marketer doesn't want you to have a choice to view the message or not, because you might choose not to.

And so you deny me my Free Will. You uncool immoral insensitive clod.
Guess who's standing next to the lawyers against the wall after the revolution?

Ya don't mail HIPAA or SOX or FDA regulated sites

[Anonymous Coward]

Has it occurred to you that the "nothing but positive response" may be because all the intelligently administered sites are shit-canning your HTML emails before they reach actual users? I used to get bulletins from Magnetic North, Inc. but they stopped a year or so back - er, no they didn't really, they just started sending elaborate HTML messages that couldn't reach me since no regulated site can possibly allow mail that hotlinks a dozen remote images and includes ten .gif attachments!

Any really glitzy HTML sales pitch is programmatically indistinguishable from spam, kapische?

Our mail system tosses hundreds of 'em every day. YOU ARE LOSING SALES DUMMY...

Re:Guilty.

[harlows_monkeys]

Ok, HTML Emails are appalling. They're hideous, unnecessary, garish and trite. They should be blocked, banned, their purveyors and designers blacklisted.

But.. I've done it. I've manually encoded html with embedded images for sending to a client that used HTML emails internally, impressed the client and got some benefit from that.

I think it is time for us old farts to give up this fight, and admit we lost--and that we lost because we were actually on the wrong side.

Consider regular mail. The kind you put on paper and send in an envelope via the post office. If I were sending someone a regular mail asking them, say, about a strange spike in bandwidth usage last Tuesday, I would, naturally, include a graph showing bandwidth usage for the week. And if I also mentioned that the new server rack was in place, I might include a photo, either separately in the envelope, or inline in the letter.

Now let's imagine email had never been invented, and we just came up with the idea. How would we design an email system? I think we'd think it obvious that we have to make it at least as capable as regular mail, and would probably come up with an HTML body plus attachments as the format (for portability, as opposed to word processor formats). I think there is zero chance we'd say "wait a minute...we'd better make this plain text only, because 25 years ago, many computers did not have graphical displays".

Re:It's about storage space.

[Cruxus]

Gryffin [slashdot.org] wrote:

You've obviously never worked in marketing.
Marketing is all about that first impression. The marketer wants to impress the message on you the moment you view the email in your Preview Pane. User choice has nothing to do with it. Heck, the marketer doesn't want you to have a choice to view the message or not, because you might choose not to.
I know this is Slashdot, where alpha *nix geeks prefer editing text files to using a GUI, and design and typography are considered just useless fluff. But in the Real World, appearances do matter. If your message is pleasant to the eye, it's more likely to be read. Even better if it grabs attention, compelling the user to look. ASCII text doesn't have that sort of impact; HTML can, if done right.

That's exactly the point: It's marketing! Marketing is junk. Maybe there's some segment of the population that does respond positively to nuisance phone calls and unwanted e-mails, but I'm not one of them, and I'm sure as hell glad about any technology change that sets marketers back.

I have absolutely no sympathy for telemarketers and spammers--none. People in these professions (including the "e-mail designers" who support the spammers ^Z^Znewsletters) should consider ways to making a living ethically, that is without violating others' rights.

Re:It's about storage space.

[WNight]

Yeah yeah, we've heard the claptrap.

There are good fancy first impressions and bad ones. If I open an envelope and expect I letter, I'll junk a beautiful flyer because it's obviously bulk email and can say nothing that I need to hear - if their product is important Anandtech will review it, or whatever. It'll enter my view through one of the experts who find good products, not a shill who pumps anything.

If however, I open that envelope and find a letter written by a person about a concern of mine and it points to a product, I'll probably at least glance at the product. After comdex I used to get two types of email. Spam fliers that told me nothing, and letters from salespeople who'd had time to talk to their engineers and answered specific questions, even if only, which product in their brochure is for *me*!

If you send something that doesn't look like personal communication, it's not email, it's a webpage you managed to stuff into email.

Expect a brick that I managed to stuff into email.

Re:It's about storage space.

[noamsml]

I can think of one: I would LOVE to have my weekly school newsletter formatted in HTML with proper in-document links and distinct headings. Right now, I receive into my inbox every month a 20-page-long chunk of text.

Re:It's about storage space.

[x2A]

Wow, how melodramatic. You do realise that if people didn't respond to marketing, there wouldn't be a market for marketers, right? Blame the demand, not the supply.

Re:It's about storage space.

[x2A]

Absolutely. No shops should be allowed to display signs advertising what they're selling. Billboards should be outlawed. TV adverts should be banned, and only people who can afford increased subscription fees should be allowed to watch shows. People should only be aware of the existence of something if they have gone looking for it (ya know, without knowing it exists).

Re:email designers?

[slocan]

That would be true if one would think that graphical layout and design communicate nothing.

Some simple white space between text, creates what we call paragraphs [wikipedia.org]. These are used in quite specific ways to convey meaning and intent by the creator of a text. (This was the first example that sprung to my mind as I thought of the possibilities of graphically designing a communication).

And why should email communication possibilities be restricted, when one can leverage graphic forms of expression [wikipedia.org] and communication design [wikipedia.org]?

Communication and graphic design can be used "to get in, communicate, and get out", in ways that unformatted text can't. (It isn't necessarily better, for it's a tool. But, being a tool, if well employed it can achieve what unformatted text can't, in the same way).

Re:It's about storage space.

[Mr. Slippery]

You are effing-A RIGHT I never worked in marketing. I never worked in prostitution or drug-dealing either, which I consider to be similar fields of endeavor.

Hey, that's not fair. Prostitutes and drug-dealers actually provide goods and services that people want, and it's a low blow to them to compare them to marketing flacks.

Re:It's about storage space.

[x2A]

"You put on a dealers defence" ... "You knowingly violate me" ... "doing what the marketer wants, whether I want it or not"

And you can't see how that's perhaps, just a little bit melodramatic?!! Oh the adverts on the TV that burn through the air and impact my retinas, eating like hungry dogs to my enternally increasingly darkening brain, the dollar bondage capitalism that scratches control from the wrists of those who are... well, basically, not responsible for their own actions, by your own assertion. If you can't say "no I won't" more times than these "evil marketers" can say "yes you will", then you are weaker than they are, and as per the laws of nature, the strong will dominate, because the strong make things happen. Don't whine about being weak, that just says how much you need looking after, someone to make your decisions for you, which is exactly what you're complaining about these marketers doing; trying to get you to do their thing. If people trying to make decisions for you is the problem, and you want to solve it by having people make decisions for you, then you're stuck with a problem forever.

(see, I can do melodrama too)