Manage Email Signatures Centrally - For All Users

Jesper Frier · Last edited by Jesper Frier on Sun Jul 29, 2007 8:07 am; edited 6 times in total

Poor HTML email rendering in Outlook 2007

Instead of taking advantage of Internet Explorer 7, Outlook 2007 uses the very limited support for HTML and CSS that is built into Word 2007 to display HTML email messages.

The limitations imposed by Word 2007 are:

no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
no support for forms
no support for Flash, or other plugins
no support for floats
no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
no support for CSS positioning
no support for animated GIFs
no support for image ALT tags

Recommendations:

do not use HTML or CSS background
put a link in your email that goes to a hosted web form. If you decide to embed images, you will need a width and hight tag to keep the image dimension.
link to your Flash from your email and don't use JavaScript in email
you'd need to use a table to position the elements instead
Attach a rich format document if you want fancy bullits
use a multiple-column table layout instead of CSS positioning
be sure that all importent content is in the first frame of any animated GIFs
Still use ALT tag to describe your linked image on other email clients than OL 2007

We do generally not recommend using CSS (due to poor rendering in Lotus Notes), but if you prefer CSS, this is our recommendations:
Use inline styling with the style attribute as an alternative to the <STYLE> tag in the head of your HTML: