Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it

by tortilla • 17 years ago

58 42 17 years ago

philfreo• 17 years ago

It's great that this is getting a lot of attention on Twitter. I just hope MS is willing to listen enough to fix it...

reconbot• 17 years ago

I don't care too much about outlook and I use it every day - I just rather plain text in email honestly, websites can stay html ;)

but that twitter wall looks amazing! Looks like he may have coded it up himself - I know some activist groups would love to have one of those!

snprbob862• 17 years ago

That twitter wall definitely is cool, but the pop-in moves the text and makes it hard to read. It would be better if the new tweet tiles slid in, animated. The speech bubbles should also stay fixed, but their tails should move along with the animation.

prodigal_erik• 17 years ago

I hope they realize there's no shortage of email clients which wouldn't render that monstrosity the way they had in mind.

fsniper• 17 years ago

no html email please..

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

No freedom please, someone else might abuse it.

No HTML email abuse, I agree with.

Not giving me the option to put a proper table in an email instead of a hand-drawn ASCII bodge because you're afraid of junk mail, I don't agree with.

snprbob862• 17 years ago

Sad fact: Not going to happen anytime soon. Definitely not for Outlook 2010.

They turned to Word for HTML editing/rendering in Outlook 2007 because there was no Internet Explorer team during development. IE7 was released in 2007, but Office 2007 was in development since at least 2003. No IE team means there was no one to send design change requests to. Office doesn't like being at the mercy of other teams, so they break dependencies whenever possible. The lack of an IE team was a perfect example of why this is a successful practice for them.

Word offers a significantly better editing experience and most email clients only render a small subset of standard HTML anyway. Gmail, for example, throws away all headers including CSS. It was a perfectly reasonable cost/benefit trade off for the Outlook team to switch to an editor and renderer they could directly change or influence. There wasn't a big loss of compatability, but there was some. Most HTML email in actual usage renders the same between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 because they would have to be written to the lowest common denominator in order to render correctly in most other mail clients as well.

Outlook 2007 added DRM to emails which, besides being the most annoying thing ever, was a feature highly demanded by customers. This feature is based on Word's DRM.

So, putting on my Microsoft PM hat... let's do a cost benefit analysis of switching Outlook to use the IE8 rendering engine:

Benefits:

1) HTML email authors (who don't pay us anything, by the way) will have a slightly easier time now.

2) HTML email authors will have a significantly easier time in the distant future.

Costs:

1) Second release to break HTML mail compatability in a row.

2) Will need to re-implement DRM. This includes a full battery of security reviews.

3) Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements.

4) Once again at the mercy of the IE8 team, who already have a huge backlog of work and probably don't care about our DCRs.

shrug Not going to happen in 2010. Probably won't happen in the next release either. When some version of IE supports 100% of all standards and is as fast as a hypothetical future Chrome, such that they have time to deal with the Outlook team, then maaaybe, just maybe they can tackle this... two releases of Office later.... If you're lucky.

andreyf• 17 years ago

Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements

This is something that blows my mind. How can we have WYSIWYG editing functionality since the 70's, and when "the web" comes along, we decide to build everything on top of HTML/CSS, which is insanely hard to implement WYSIWYG on top of? Ditto for drag/drop and right click for God's sake.

plesn• 17 years ago

Naïve question I'm genuinely asking my self: why?

What is the reason it is so difficult to implement WYSIWYG not top of HTML/CSS (i kind of feal it thinking at latex,but can't put a reason other than "organisation of the source")? on top of which kind of serialisable representation would it be easier, is there any..?

ams6110• 17 years ago

'cause HTML was designed primarily as a markup language, not a layout language.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

How the heck do you tie DRM into an email client?

Does the client make sure that you have the rights to view the email I sent to you?

gaius2• 17 years ago

It can "expire" email after a certain time.

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

Yes, it does. Microsoft call it IRM (Information Rights Management) and you need to install/enable it on your domain and Office 2007 hooks into it.

You can then put limits on who can copy, print, fax the email, who can cut/paste from it, to whom you can forward it and force expiry of it.

It includes fun bits such as "The first time that you try to open an e-mail message that uses restricted permission, you must connect to a licensing server to verify your credentials and to download a use license".

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Sending webpages as email is broken — let's not do it.

dtf• 17 years ago

Let's face it, email is on the way out anyway. Its future demographic consists entirely of nostalgic hackers, antiquated corporate IT regimes and orphaned spambots.

jrnkntl• 17 years ago

Try to convince the companies that rely for a large part on e-marketing. Trust me, that are a lot of companies.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

Are there studies that show HTML-mails work better for marketing? Not saying there aren't but would be interesting to know.

They certainly don't work better for me, because usually they literally display nothing (since I have disabled loading of remote images).

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

Having ways to embedd tables, images, fonts in emails is useful. Let's do it.

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

This is basically the attitude of the kmail developers - html email is bad.

Who could possibly ever want to send a link or photo to someone in an email. Everyone should be forced to have green console text on a black background.

Why can't they just use the IE8 rendering engine?

extension2• 17 years ago

Images can be attached to an email without HTML and URLs that appear in text/plain emails are "linkified" by most readers.

The original MIME specification included an "enriched text" subtype which was essentially an HTML subset that was easy to implement safely and served most purposes for person-to-person communication.

MIME allows absolutely anything to be embedded in an email, but the standard explicitly discourages the use of HTML as the message body. The argument for standard compliant HTML support in all email clients is fairly weak considering it shouldn't be there at all.

alyx• 17 years ago

Here is the official response from Office.

http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2009/06/24/the-power-o...

jsz0• 17 years ago

Surely Microsoft can fix this problem by adding more toolbars and icons to the GUI or by further degrading Outlook's ability to search large mailboxes. At that point no one will even remember Word HTML rendering was an issue in the first place.

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

Good news - Microsoft fixed that search problem over two years ago by handling it on the server in Exchange 2007, so you can search quickly from Outlook / Outlook Web Access / your ActiveSync mobile (Windows Mobile / iPhone).

absconditus• 17 years ago

What if I'm not connected to the server?

jwr• 17 years ago

Are you kidding? Proper HTML rendering is the least of Outlook's problems.

I blame Outlook for the mess that E-mail became. Top-posting, citing entire E-mails, people being unable to distinguish cited text from new text, unbroken long line, unreadable and unformatted E-mails.

greyman2• 17 years ago

My thoughts exactly. I never had a problem with email being in html format, nor with being coded by using tables. CSS purists don't like tables, but other than that, this topic is a non-issue.

gaius2• 17 years ago

To be fair, the people who do that would do it with any email client. Remember, your typical corporate email user was never on Usenet, has never been on a mailing list, genuinely doesn't know the difference between "reply" and "reply all", etc. It just so happens that these people get given Outlook and they use it. Or not, even, loads of senior managers, even at tech companies, have their secretaries send email for them and would consider reading 10 messages a day themselves "too much".

greyman2• 17 years ago

No, no, no. I use outlook at work, gmail for general email and also thunderbird for one other email address. And I really didn't come across a problem that email being coded in html tables.

nopassrecover• 17 years ago

Heh Outlook's functionality has never been my problem (though Xobni makes it better and Gmail handles conversations better). Instead, Outlook's performance is the big issue.

st3fan• 17 years ago

What about "let's not use it" instead.

DanielStraight• 17 years ago

That website is broken beyond belief.

weegee• 17 years ago

so don't use Outlook. problem solved.

Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it

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