Spending hours designing an email newsletter only for Microsoft Outlook to continue living in the stone age and fucking ruin it for you.

It uses fucking word as a rendering engine for html. You have no chance. Fucking tables for layout 2016. Microsoft and its crappy suite of software have been a constant pain in the arse the whole of my career.

After decades my new laptop is the first machine I did not install Office. Loving it!

Lol

@jumpshot - what office suite are you using?

@op - this week I've encountered the exact same issue. It's been back and forth w/ QA with it. I sent them the HTML so they can see its correct lol

I was trying the vrect background image but it was being a pain in the ass so I've provided a basic colour fallback for Outlook users. It still looks decent to be fair, it's just a shame for any Outlook 2010 and lower users. "Fuck 'em" 😉

@champion01 - on my personal machine - Google- sheets, docs, slides, drawings, forms... Also - tricked-out Gmail with Gmail Labs stuff.

More than enough for most tasks. What are you guys using?

@jumpshot - ah those are excellent alternatives to Microsoft office. We should start using those. Smart choices! I bet your computer runs better too

At my company it's very corporate, so we use a Microsoft stack, outlook, linq, jira, and the works. Kinda lame cuz we get these HTML issues.

@champion01 - yeah, similar Msoft stack at work. Hopefully someday that will change.

Web based clients/mobile email is always better since they can easily adapt to new css standards with software updates 😊

Eh to all above. Doesn't really matter whats better, you're still stuck supporting office so you might as well code the emails in tables with no background images since consumers are still going to use it and the new clients support them without issue. Doing this your safer and you'll have less code which will help you not land in promotions all the time.

I build a fair few html email templates for use in mailchimp. My templates are rock solid. I always work to supporting the lowest form of shite which is outlook. It can be a pain though if you didn't live through the early days of tables for layout. Only basic CSS is supported and this must be inline. Forget margins, padding and background images. There's a good CSS inliner, online so you can build with it in the head inline itdo it at the end. Google mailchimp CSS inliner.

I use Mailchimp too but their templates aren't even 100% solid. Neither are the litmus templates. I always find myself hacking them to bits to achieve what I want in Outlook. Ahhhh well!