Twitter campaign against Outlook 2010 limitations

Microsoft will use the same techniques in Outlook 2010 as in Outlook 2007. They will again use the Microsoft Word rendering engine to display e-mails. This engine has a limited HTML code support which causes problems with people who want to create and send nicely formatted e-mails.

The E-mail Standards Project is trying for years now to create a wider acceptance of HTML standards in e-mail clients. Dave Greiner has therefore set up a Twitter campaign to send a clear message to Microsoft that the Word rendering engine is completely outdated. As an example he shows the image below to indicate 10 years of Outlook "progress".

Anyone can sign up at fixoutlook.org and leave a twitter message to show their support for the campaign. In a short time almost 25,000 people have registered, attracting Microsoft attention. In response to the campaign, Microsoft explains that they want to provide the same user experience for users typing a letter in Word and users typing a e-mail in Outlook. Dave Greiner however doesn't advocate discarding the Word rendering engine, he just only wants the engine to support the current HTML standard.

Furthermore, Microsoft claims the Word rendering engine is more safe than the Internet Explorer engine for instance, because of the lack of support for (evil) webscripts. Most modern e-mail clients block webscripts by default.

Support the campaign?
We experience interoperability problems almost on a daily basis. E-mail marketeers struggle to create mailings which are displayed correctly in all e-mail clients. That's why Copernica also supports this campaign. We want to help convince Microsoft to "fix Outlook".

Do you share this opinion? Go to fixoutlook.org and leave a twitter message. Add "fixoutlook.org" to your tweet and you will automatically be recognized as participant.