Email Marketing Tips - Windows' Rendering Disaster

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Windows' Rendering Disaster

Yahoo! has been experimenting with a number of changes over the past few months, and its email platform is one of them.

It's easy to express dismay over Microsoft's questionable decision to use Word rather than Outlook for email rendering. Microsoft will soon be dropping Hotmail altogether for Windows Live Mail, and a number of problems are already presenting themselves in testing. As David Grenier wrote back in April,

If there's a chance that a reasonable percentage of your recipients will be using Outlook 2007, then a completely CSS based email design just won't cut it. If your layout is column based, you have no option but to use tables for the basic structure of your email. You're also going to need to dumb down your CSS usage.

Not exactly good news, and something that every emessaging company will need to consider. But in the meantime, Yahoo! seems to be doing everything right. There is no requirement for current users to switch to the new platform (as we see with Microsoft), and Yahoo! will still be, all things considered, the best web-based email client available in terms of CSS support.

What does all this mean for you?

1. Be sure that you don't forget how to create tables, because Windows Live Mail will still require it.


2. Let Microsoft know how you feel. It's not impossible to move mountains; and, curiously, Microsoft has let it be known that it will read comments on this issue. All your email design team needs to do is forward examples of CSS-based designs that are now breaking in Outlook 2007.


3. Take a survey of your customers and see exactly where they fall in terms of email clients. This could give your design team the information it needs to create emails that won't break, no matter what outlandish requirements the email client may present.