Outlook 2007 email problems

Outlook 2007 email problems

For those of you who create and send email newsletters, there are a few changes to the way Outlook 2007 will display your newsletters. Most Outlook users are probably still using an older version, but that will change soon. These are some of the changes in Outlook 2007.

• Limited or no support for background images and background colors. These will either be removed or not displayed consistently, so if you’re used to using them, you’ll want to adjust them.
• There is no support for forms. This could be an embedded survey that will now need to be a link to a form on a website.
• The background colors of the nested tables will not be displayed, only the background color of the highest level table will be applied.
• There is no support for animated gif files.
• Without support for floats. This is used for positioning elements.

Before Outlook 2007, there were 2 different rendering engines for Outlook; Internet Explorer (IE) was for reading email content and Word for composing messages. So Microsoft decided to be consistent and use Word for both reading and writing. This meant a loss of support for the style that was there for IE and causes tweaks to try to keep the appearance of email newsletters consistent across various email programs. If you’re using images, you’ll still want to make sure you use captions in case the images don’t display. This was the case in Outlook 2003. For newsletters with many images, it does not leave any message content because the images do not display correctly. Support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for Outlook 2007 email newsletters has gone a step backwards. For details about HTML and CSS rendering in Outlook and Word 2007, visit Microsoft.com.

Remember to test your email newsletters in as many email applications as possible to ensure that your recipients consistently display your message.