Oh the dismay we feel here at Firecracker! Microsoft is planning to continue the use of Word as the rendering engine for MS Outlook 2010. This might not mean much to some but for those who build beautiful HTML emails for their clients, this means more coding hell for at least the next 5 years.

Current issues with building HTML emails differ to those for building a regular webpage. At least with browsers, there are some standards laid down – whether or not the browser chooses to comply with them! But with email clients, there are no standards at all which means you build a HTML email and it looks this in Hotmail, and that in Outlook. And being that there are DOZENS of email clients out there, testing can be quite a headache.

Things were bad enough before Microsoft released Outlook 2007. But with the release of 2007 – and the use of Word as the rendering engine – HTML email build went back a decade. It was a matter of ‘goodbye background images, div based layouts and all the lovely things you can so with CSS, and hello table layouts, minimal styling and the pain’. Oh the pain!

So now that Microsoft has decided to stick to Word as the rendering engine for the next iteration of Outlook, the wonderful people at Campaign Monitor and the Email Standards Project have banded together to protest against this madness and attempt to get Microsoft to rethink their decision. We’ve joined the protest too! Check it out at fixoutlook.org.