I cannot believe that Microsoft Outlook, in 2019, is still using the broken word-based HTML rendering which is an insult to the whole industry and a pain for anybody in email business.<p>Is there a strategy behind this? Is Outlook on maintenance mode with no developers? Or is it on their best interest to keep it broken?
When I clicked the link I thought it would be about something that confused me for a while: What do people mean when they write a capital J in their emails? I eventually figured out that it's because Outlook automatically converts a smiley emoticon into a WingDings (an old Microsoft icon font from before that term became popularized on the web) version, which happens to have J as the character for a smiling face. View that on a machine that doesn't have the WingDings font installed, and you just get a capital J. Raymond Chen blogged about it too: <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31103" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...</a>
I'm always annoyed by Outlook's HTML, I remember when it set Calibri as font and the fall back was "sans-serif" which would not really work.<p>It really made me wish that HTML in emails would vanish, just vanish and never come back again. Sadly this won't happening.
> Outlook does support @font-face declarations (but doesn’t load distant fonts). Because Outlook can’t display that font, it falls back to its expected mso-generic-font-family value. And because it’s not defined, it falls back to its auto value, matching the roman font family, thus falling back to Times New Roman.<p>It also seems that mso-font-alt can be used in a similar way:<p><a href="https://litmus.com/community/discussions/36-outlook-and-fallback-fonts#comment-2459" rel="nofollow">https://litmus.com/community/discussions/36-outlook-and-fall...</a><p>And there are many more mso-prefixed options available, though documentation is scarce: <a href="https://litmus.com/community/learning/8-outlook-overview" rel="nofollow">https://litmus.com/community/learning/8-outlook-overview</a><p>Generally it seems like this isn't very well known. Hopefully this gets a signal boost and best-practices articles get updated with the advice.
> I hope you enjoyed this read as much as I enjoyed doing this research.<p>Redmond's quirkery has been a pleasure these decades, for "yelling obscenities" values of "pleasure".
Maybe I’m dense and I couldn’t draw this conclusion — were those properties always available but we’re never documented? If that’s true it seems crazy to me that Microsoft couldn’t just say, “Hey I know everyone is mad about font-face not being respected. Here’s this property you can set and all is well.”
There is yet another gem hidden in that post:<p><pre><code> src: local('Pacifico Regular'), local('Pacifico-Regular'), url(https://www.caniemail.com/tests/assets/fonts/pacifico-regular.woff2) format('woff2');
</code></pre>
Basically... isn't this a way to bypass the default external resource loading block for mail clients other than Outlook, meaning that this could be (ab)used for stealth "read receipts"?
Outlook can't even display raw TEXT consistently. We have a confirmation email that goes out when somehow submits to our contact us form.<p>In all email clients except outlook, the footer is on two lines (because there is a CR there).<p>line1<CR><p>line2<p>In outlook (and only outlook)?<p>line1line2<p>The rest of the email is fine, just these two lines of the footer are smooshed together.
I could be missing the plot here, but I always got the impression that Outlook limits (sets) the fonts and colours in order to make the emails look like they "were sent by MS/Outlook". But again, this may be my idiosyncratic MS experience.
I wonder, does Outlook 2019 have the "system" font glitch from Win 3.xx? I think I'll be sending out all my HTML emails in either System or Courier from now on; just to pull peoples' legs.
> <i>This morning I was doing some tests in Outlook on supported styles for HTML lists.</i><p>"Today I was doing unpaid QA on a widely reviled proprietary Microsoft office app ..."