Microsoft “improves” html support for e-mails
January 30 2007
by Jake Liddell
Before I go any further, let’s just get where I stand on this decision out in the open. Microsoft, this change you are making is not good, and a backward step. There, done!
Now, how do I think it affects me, in writing e-mails for mailing lists, and helping clients to do the same? Not very much really.
You see, whilst Microsoft is taking a backwards step, they’re stepping back to a position that is already existing when you look at other e-mail clients that are still very prevalent today. Check out Campaign Monitor’s resources (http://www.campaignmonitor.com) for details, but Lotus Notes and Eudora are this basic in many ways too.
Therefore, irrespective of whether you consider this to be a daft backwards step by MS, or whether you agree with them that using the same rendering engine used to write e-mails (Word 2007) to read them sounds logical, I still think it’s good practice to refrain from all but the most basic styling in e-mails, for wider accessibility.
People are wining about not being able to set images as backgrounds, or use images properly in tables any more. But images look rubbish in e-mails anyway, because lots of modern e-mail clients block the automatic displaying of html image tags because they may be referencing external spamming websites, thus confirming you’ve looked at the mail. So your beautiful image-rich e-mail looks terrible anyway, unless your non-image content persuades the client to download the images.
My advice - stick to good old semantic HTML for your e-mails - headers, paragraphs, lists, quotations. You can style these nicely, they’re quite accessible, and you can still get an effect that’s in keeping with your corporate branding, and one which will actually appear on far more machines than an image-based approach which is pixel-perfect, but doesn’t display on most customers’ systems. Also, if the styles don’t get applied by a particular client, so what? The text is still there, you’re still communicating with your customers, and if they want pretty pictures they can always come and look at the lovely HTML version you’re offering on your website.
Oh yeah, one last point - when you see these newsletter type e-mails to customers, how often do they say “Don’t reply to this e-mail - it’s automated and we’ll ignore any replies to this e-mail box.”? How daft is that? So, MS now say you can’t use forms on your e-mail. Don’t bother! In all but the most high-volume situations, you should be over the moon if a potential customer can be bothered to reply to your email! It’s an e-mail system we’re talking about here, so what’s the easiest way you can let your customers act on your e-mail? Replying to it! If you want an automated sign-up form of some type, put a link to it from the e-mail, and host it on your website, where you can do proper validation and verification of entered data, and provide a much more useable experience. But allowing people to just reply to the mail might mean you get a lot more replies. I think this is a “good thing”!
You can read more about Microsoft’s decision, what HTML will now work, and download a tool to test your e-mails at Microsoft’s page on the subject: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx