Fix Outlook
Personally, like other old web curmudgeons (OK so Dave Shea isn’t really old), I’m not a big fan of either sending or receiving HTML email. But, it’s a reality of life, and more importantly if something supports HTML, it should to the extent possible support modern web development best practices. Something that Outlook, the email client used by many millions doesn’t do (mind you, neither does Gmail, and other email clients and online apps, but that’s for another day).
So, our good friends at Campaign Monitor have decided to do something about it (and indeed, have been doing something about poor standards support in all manner of email clients for some time with their “email standards” project).
A day or so ago, they started a twitter based campaign fixoutlook (OK, so restricting it to just twitter might have been less than ideal, but…). In a day or so, the campaign has generated over 20,000 responses — clearly folks care about this sort of thing!
Sadly, the response from the Outlook team, while fast, has not been positive. The response to their response (see comments) has been as fast, and far from in agreement.
Two lessons I draw from this. First, the web is the web is the web — you either support it or you don’t — that seems to be the message coming from all angles. It’s a lesson Microsoft’s browser division certainly embraced with IE7 and 8, and perhaps needs to be better understood by others within that admittedly many headed organization. The second is that when folks care, it takes less than a day to rally thousands upon thousands to voice their concerns. Personally, as I said at the top — I’m Old Skool. Email == plain text for me. But that’s not the point. The masses have spoken. What happens next? We’ll have to see.