This is interesting: In the new Outlook, MS is using the Word rendering engine for display instead of the IE one. Now, I hate HTML email, and I have very little sympathy for newsletters that rely on it - but there are a lot of people who are going to be unhappy about this. For instance, Campaign Monitor:

Unfortunately, that [CSS support in Outlook] all goes down the toilet now. If your email breaks in Notes or Eudora, it was often an acceptable casualty, but if it breaks in Outlook, you're more than likely ostracizing too many recipients to justify your design approach. This certainly doesn't spell the end for HTML email, it just takes us back 5 years where tables and nasty inline CSS was the norm.

It's interesting that they did this; the only thing I can come up with is that the security issues with IE remain unresolved. Or maybe someone decided that they should use the same engine to display that they use to compose. Either way, it's going to make a fair number of people unhappy - for reasons like this:

Word 2007 supports a subset of the standard HTML 4.01 specification and of the Internet Explorer 6.0 HTML specification. Word 2007 also supports a subset of the standard Cascading Stylesheet Specification, Level 1. Word 2007 uses HTML elements that support a subset of the Word 2007 cascading style sheets properties. This article categorizes the Word 2007 supported cascading style sheets properties as follows:

Heh - so the display is going to suck worse than IE6. Amazing.

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