Why It’s More Likely Now that We’ll Be Able to FixOutlook

Frustrations with email rendering in Outlook run deep. They date back to 2007 when Microsoft switched its Outlook rendering engine from Internet Explorer to Word, which had—and still has—poor support for HTML and CSS.

Those frustrations boiled over with the FixOutlook.org Project, which Campaign Monitor started in 2009. Aimed at getting Microsoft’s attention, the effort generated more than 24,000 tweets—including several from me—that were turned into a giant poster that was sent to Microsoft’s VP of Office.

The effort drew national media coverage and did succeed in eliciting a response from an understandably defensive Microsoft, which essentially said that they weren’t prepared to make any changes at that time. The release of Outlook 2010, which had basically the same rendering as Outlook 2007, confirmed Microsoft’s position.

Flash forward to Aug. 16, 2016, when Microsoft and Litmus announced a partnership to improve rendering in Outlook. Some people have asked: Why did this take so long? What’s different now?

Actually, quite a lot.

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog