I would fix Outlook so that it rendered emails with IE or some engine other than Word. I would do some other things too: have Chelsea and Man U replay that Champions League Final without Drogba getting sent-off and Terry falling, get Carnivale put back on the air, and make Fat Tire available in Cincinnati. The fixing Outlook thing would be very high on my priority list though.

Internet marketers and developers have been pulling there hair out over Outlook’s rendering of HTML emails ever since Outlook 2007 first came out.  In the past, Outlook used Internet Explorer to render emails. This was fine, it was great. Oh, it suppresses CSS and Flash objects? Fine, no big deal, so does GMail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. We can work that. Now though, Outlook uses Word, a word-processor, to render emails within the application. All of a sudden background images are no longer supported and only the most basic of HTML will render properly. Here is what the same email looks like in Outlook 2000 and in Outlook 2010. This wouldn’t be that big of a problem except that Outlook has the largest market-share of end-users by far and has wantonly gone and changed the standards that it uses to render emails.

But what can we do about such things?

Well, first of all, we have to cope. ExactTarget has published a white paper about designing for Outlook 2007 with some tips to ease the pain. The main point they make though is to “test, test, test”. Which is always sage advice.

Secondly, we can make our collective despair heard by raising our voices together. To this end, fixoutlook.org has risen to herald the cause. I encourage you to visit their site and lend your voice, especially since Microsoft has recently announced that Outlook 2010 will continue to use Word to improperly render emails.