Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Today starts my weekly series of “Outlook 2007 Offenders”, to show you the effects of the new Outlook 2007 HTML rendering engine (MS Word). We will then examine the HTM and show you why the email is having problems.

Who better to start with than B-to-B, since Outlook is predominantly used by the business world (around 85%). Aside from the email getting flagged as spam, which it does frequently, the email is a mess in Outlook 2007.

View detail image

After examining the HTML, here’s why Outlook 2007 rendered the email like this:

1. Styles are referenced in header (Outlook 2007 doesn’t recognize styles defined in the head tag.)

This causes:
- Font to lose formatting
- Margin of email doesn’t show – there should be 10 pixels of padding between the content & edges of the email
- Background doesn’t fill consistently, there is a div tag that is referencing a style tag in the head of the document.

2. No Defined Table Width

This causes:
- Inconsistent view depending on the size of your email window.
- The email shell to stretches to the width of email client window no matter how wide or narrow.
- The “Forward to a Friend” graphic is within a table that has a width defined so it is in a set position while the rest of the email width is undefined.

Keep an eye out for this new weekly feature – Outlook 07 Offenders.