Office 2007 - Act 5 - Outlook again

Well, I just got bitten by Microsoft Outlook. Well, actually, Microsoft Word.

We're working on a web site for consumers to be able to register for an offer. After registration, they are provided with a certificate number on what we refer to as the thank-you page, and also receive that certificate number in an email. The client has some pretty specific (and rather neat-looking, if you ignore the fact that it's red) background that looks like dirty parchment at the edges. Naturally, the email should have the same look. No problem. We've done it before.

But we didn't reckon on Office 2007. Apparently, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has changed (or eliminated) the html rendering engine in Outlook 2007, and uses Microsoft Word to do the rendering. Well, there's a whole raft of options that have been removed from the rendering engine, including putting a "background-image: url(...)" into the stylesheet.

So we tried the alternate - background="..." on the body tag. Works fine.

But not in Outlook 2003. It doesn't render that. And 2007 won't render it either if there's a "background-image: url(...)" in the stylesheet, even if it is there.

So Microsoft has completely eliminated the option of putting a background on the body in html email that will render properly in its two most recent Office-based mail clients. Apparently you can still put backgrounds on table td elements, though.

It's enough to make you want to use Thunderbird (which handled all of the above situations, even the combinations, correctly, by the way).

You know, cross-email testing is way worse than cross-browser testing.