Outlook 2010: The nightmare continues

As per a post­ing I made to the WSG list ear­lier this afternoon:

We have a prob­lem! Out­look 2010, accord­ing to Cam­paign Mon­i­tor, is going to con­tinue to use the crip­pled MS Word lay­out engine. They adopted this as the sta­tus quo for Out­look 2007 and promptly set rich email with CSS, etc., back a num­ber of years, and are show­ing no great sign of diverg­ing from this path. How­ever, there is hope! Cam­paign Mon­i­tor have started a web­site in con­junc­tion with their “Email Stan­dards Project” — essen­tially a stan­dards advo­cacy web­site. They need your sup­port now more than ever.

FixOutlook.org aims to col­late the community’s dis­con­tent with this deci­sion using Twit­ter to change Microsoft’s pol­icy deci­sion on this one before it’s too late and we’re stuck with yet another five-ten years of infe­rior email authoring!

If you’re a Twit­ter user, it’ll take two sec­onds to retweet and show your support.

Thanks!

Josh

Fix Outlook 2010 website

This is a really impor­tant issue for any­one involved in email mar­ket­ing, and well worth tak­ing the effort to make some noise about. Essen­tially, if we don’t get off this track it’ll be years until it is pos­si­ble to drop sup­port for these infe­rior clients (as is the case with IE6, now) and we’ll all be deal­ing with sub-par mail­ing author­ing, cross-compatibility, and dis­play issues for a while to come.

Get tweet­ing! :)

# by Josh on June 24th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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Outlook 2007 again…

I’ve been doing the low-bandwidth mobile thing for the past two months due to travel and had accord­ingly been reserv­ing judg­ment JUST IN CASE that had any­thing at all to do with it. But it really doesn’t. Out­look 2007 is an absolute loser of a prod­uct. No other soft­ware on my com­puter is as vis­i­bly frus­trat­ing or unsta­ble. It’s being used with three POP accounts (all mostly well behaved) and one IMAP store (unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter) that work fine with other clients. This shouldn’t be so hard to get right. I don’t like hav­ing to use web­mail, though at least it’s very good webmail.

These are the sort of nig­gly prob­lems that make OS X look appeal­ing… Mail.app is inte­grated with OS search and all that other stuff so nicely. Cal­en­dars and Con­tacts are no longer com­pellingly bet­ter on Out­look than else­where. In fact, between Sony Eric­s­son and Microsoft, var­i­ous con­tacts in my phone man­aged to get junked because of char­ac­ter encod­ing issues — even when using a lan­guage installed on both phone and sync computer.

Email is a freakin’ ancient tech. Why can’t this just be straight­for­ward, Microsoft?

# by Josh on August 21st, 2008 Tags: , , , , , ,
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