[grenoire]

Christ on a bike, the state of Outlook on Windows is absolutely miserable. I knew it by experience when I started preparing HTML signatures for our company, but seeing the list makes me even sadder about the absolute state of incompetency caused by legacy systems in Microsoft. For those uninformed, Outlook on Windows effectively works on a terrible (and terribly old) implementation of HTML that was initially developed for Word from 2001 (or older, can't remember exactly).

The Outlook ecosystem has to die.

[ndidi]

Everything that discourages designers from doing fancy things is good in my book.

[enraged_camel]

You don't get it. Stuff like this does not discourage designers. It is what gets them jobs and keeps them employed. I've worked with marketing departments where it was a designer's primary job to make things look good on email campaigns.

[other_herbert]

I had a recent request from a product owner to style the subject line... I said we can't do that and that I don't want to live in a world where senders can change the font or size of the subject in an email.... Can you imagine the crap we would have from spam in that case?!

[buildzr]

You can always pack it with emojis and unicode characters... that's what all the spammers seem to do at least.

[pbhjpbhj]

Y̗̳̬͍̘͚o͘u͏ ͏̬̟̩h̦̕a̰̖͍̟v̧̯̜͉͙̖͖͉e҉̳̲̙͚̗̬ ̤͚͉̀w̢̫͎̮̼͇o̷̮̙̩n̪͙͎̠͔ ̻̮a̛̭ ̡̪̤̻ͅp̵̭͇r̩͉į̬̺̭̯͍͙z̯͈͟e!͖̖͈̯

ie don't any mua let you use UTF8?

𝔻𝕠𝕖𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕜?

[jraph]

The first one does not work great in a terminal. The words are readable but I don't get the full experience. The second one, pretty good.

[thirdfail]

Seems like your terminal doesn't support the last line. I will repeat all three lines in tunarly fashion.

Line 1:

" You have wøn a prize! "

Unincluded line; my sister got bitten by a prize once. Or a terminal. Onto line twø: two:

Line two: (2:)

" ie don't any mua let you use UTF8? "

And three:

" Does this work? "

All the lines for all the good people. The " signs " are a delimiter for each line. They're, or should be pretty verbatim, minus the unrenderability.

Have fun.

[e12e]

Firefox on mobile mangle that pretty bad on - at least the vertical space :/

[jraph]

Firefox Mobile renders it well for me, are you sure that the comment is not rendered as it should be (with garbage from line 1 overflowing over line 2)?

[leppr]

Indeed, if it's possible, marketing is going to ask for it. And unless you have dedicated developers who specialize in email campaigns, ready to brave the nightmare that is fighting against email client formatting, the only sane and cost-effective solution to implement any kind of layout in an email is simply stacking inline images with text included.

[grenoire]

Microsoft's history has shown time after time that both internal conflict and external enterprise clients' requests lead to random developers adding bits and pieces of non-standard features. This applies not only to Outlook but their other products (incl. Windows). It is goddam' Wild West out there and they clearly give no crap about how the standards outside of their universe evolve.

Sorry Microsoft, but the PC world is not Windows-only anymore.

[usaphp]

By the same logic you could say that internet explorer was doing good things

[thomasahle]

No, the logic is: I want styled content on the Web and plain text in my emails.

[amiraliakbari]

It's not a new problem and MIME was intended to give people the choice. Not everyone likes plain text emails or terminal email clients. The solution may be forcing email senders to include text/plain as well as text/html.

[usaphp]

For that very reason you have MIME type setting

[jasonjayr]

Fix: Send WINMAIL.DAT attachments with fully formatted RTF/DOC files. Ta-da!

[Geezus42]

Fix: breaks encryption add-ons

[alberth]

I believe Outlook still uses the Microsoft Frontpage html engine.

For those who don’t know, it’s was Microsoft WYSIWYG website builder that looked similar to Word, from 20 years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage

[smacktoward]

Nope, believe it or not, ever since Outlook 2007 it uses the HTML rendering engine from Word itself. Seriously! Someone at Microsoft looked at Outlook and said "this needs to have the same rendering capabilities as noted Web browser Microsoft Word." Sheesh.

[unilynx]

I think they thought ‘lets just use Word to compose replies, but to prevent the email from getting corrupted once the user hits reply, we’ll already mangle it on the way in so the sender gets the blame’

[ecf]

Office for Windows still uses Internet Explorer as the renderer for addins built with OfficeJS, unless you're on Windows 1903 and using an insider version of Office.

I had depressed thoughts when I discovered I would be having to debug Internet Explorer in 2019.

[duxup]

I'd love to hear from some insiders how all these non standard outputs get decided inside MS. I can imagine a lot of scenarios based on experience and just thinking it out but I'd love to hear the real story.

[jrochkind1]

The samsung email client manages to support flexbox, along with pretty much every other client but AOL... and Outlook Windows.