DPI Settings With Outlook 2007

The geniuses over at Bronto have uncovered yet another flaw with the always problematic Outlook 2007. By testing to different computers using Outlook '07 at the their office, there were always glaring inconsistencies with two specific machines. Yet, the two computers that always had issues would always break in their own special ways.

Through diligent research, it was determined that the two computers had separate DPI (dots per inch) settings. The default DPI setting on Windows machines is 96. One of the computers was set to 120 DPI (the large setting) and 82 DPI (a custom setting). The former would blow out the images, causing breaks and the latter would shrink the images also causing rendering flaws.

Basically, only Outlook 2007 (and not any other desktop email client such as Thunderbird) will break any email with a setting other than the standard DPI setting of 96.

This doesn't sit well with me considering that no matter how meticulous you are when testing emails it still might end up broken when it reaches some users' inboxes. The only remedy that comes to mind is to spread the word and awareness through Email Standards Project. If there's enough outcry from the community maybe, just maybe, developers will wise-up and listen.

Blackberry Adds HTML Email Rendering To Its Bag Of Tricks

In order to keep up with ground-breaking mobile devices such as the iPhone, the developers at Blackberry have announced that "users will be able to view HTML and rich text email messages with original formatting preserved including font colors and styles, embedded images, hyperlinks, tables, bullets and other formatting." The update is apart of the Enterprise Solution v4.1 Service Pack 5.

Along with the email rendering improvements found with the update, users will also be able to "Download and edit email attachments in their native file formats" which allows users to "save file attachments to their BlackBerry smartphones, work on the documents and include them in replies to colleagues".

Sources:
Research In Motion
BlackBerry

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

Back in July, Ben Chesnut over at MailChimp wrote an excellent article on deliverability and rendering. He states that emails are more or less “just miniature web pages” and I couldn’t agree with him more. Any web designer new to the email design-game should not hesitate to read this. Here are a few bullet points to sum up the article:

• Not designing for the preview pane is stupid.
• Assuming the images will display on all clients is stupid.
• Using images to communicate your message is stupid.
• Not testing your email in different email clients is stupid.
• Not including an unsubscribe link, a physical address and privacy policy in your footer is stupid.
• Including Javascript and Flash in your email is stupid.

CSS in the Year 2007

The fine folks at Campaign Monitor just recently published their “Guide to CSS Support in Email: 2007 Edition”. Since their last CSS wrap up, a lot has changed – unfortunately in the wrong direction – mostly having to do with Outlook 2007’s refusal to incorporate IE’s HTML rendering engine, instead opting for Word’s mediocre engine.

It isn’t all bad news though. Yahoo!, the leading web-based email client, just released their new interface, which has the most CSS compliance than any of the other competing web-clients such as Gmail and the new Window’s Live Mail service. Lets just hope that the majority of the existing users will adopt the new interface.

They conclude that table-based email designs with inline styles are a sure-fire way to ensure that your emails render correctly for both B2B and B2C purposes.

They wrap up their study quite nicely with this easy-to-reference chart in .pdf format that you can find right here.