Weekend Rants: Downgrade to Outlook 2007
1. Bare bones mailouts
Windows Vista is gradually taking hold of the casual desktop or laptop. It brings quite a heap of surprises at the graphic user interface level and less improvements down inside at the security level. One noticeable issue has already grown in a scandal of sorts concerning the Outlook 2007 HTML rendering engine: it was MSIE engine borrowed by the previous Outlook versions, but now Outlook 2007 dropped MSIE engine and it’s using MS Word’s engine. For anyone who lived from coding HTML mailouts this MS move means a return to pre-1998 standards, in a word: primitive!
Honestly, I never was a fan of HTML mail, because it’s cute and dangerous like crystal sugar. Best way is to keep it simple, bare bones TXT only mailouts, conveying the message to your list in plain text, with links where needed, no fluff, no blind shooting.
But if you really love those colored lines, the gradient backgrounds and the round corners wrapping images in, then forget about them if only one of your customers is checking her mail in MS Outlook 2007. And make no mistake: MOST of your clients will go Vista /Outlook 2007!
It’s nice to advocate for Mozilla Thunderbird, Linux on the desktop, Eudora and whatnot. I’ve been doing this for years, with sadly modest results. So you either give up all CSS/XHTML coding in your future mailouts (because they won’t show at all in Outlook 2007, crippling your messages), or rethink your designs the old century poor HTML way, or you opt for sending out plain text mails.
Either way, it’s interesting to notice how the major software seller is capable to disable a decade worth of advances in styling, function and usability.
2. A Sunny Valentine’s Day
Not sure how much snow some had to dig through to make their way out of home on Valentine’s Day in the States. But here in Europe it was a magnificent warm and sunny day, what we call the Spring of February. I took the day for me and for my lovely wife Dana. Couldn’t escape couple of chores, yet tried to keep out of exhausting routines. Returned home late in the evening, to watch Jack Bauer playing his single card against President Logan, between 1am and 4am PST (in 24 on RTL2), then Dana went to sleep while I remained on the laptop to help out a new site building with some CSS and GIMP, between 12am and 2am CET (in real life/time).
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