If memory serves, Outlook 2007 dropped the Trident rendering Engine in favour of the one built in to Word. There were howls of pain among the marketing crowds back then due to the mess that made. Perhaps now is the time to switch html rendering to Chrome. If it's good enough for Edge..

:3 yeah I think after the huge amount of vulnerabilities exploited via older versions of Outlook via Trident, I wouldn't hurry back.

Was that when Outlook stopped auto-formatting emails on-the-fly whilst you resized the message window? These days it waits until you've finished dragging the window borders before reformatting your text.

I miss that feature. I could waste hours of my working day looking for unintended acrostic messages from senior management.

"Outlook not so good".

While nicely formatted emails are very popular with marketing types...

Not only "marketing" types. There are loads of people who have no clue how to format properly and efficiently.

Most emails are very very simple and should be designed equally simple. KISS is still the important imperative, also with respect to interaction design. If you need complex designs then you are almost certainly (99.99%) doing it wrong. As simple as that.

Providing too many ways of formatting in the client always leads to added complexity and that, inevitably, results in bugs and problems.

The fault lies with both the client systems and message designers. It is necessary to send me a 50 kB message to say "Hello, welcome to XYZ"? Or even a larger message to list 10 items? This is design bloat because we allow too much and think too little. I'd almost want resource-limited systems back so we all must think before we leap.

"The fault lies with both the client systems and message designers"

Message designers? If you have a message designer you're 100% doing it wrong.

See, they also fall in the 99.99% category ;-)

Actually, you do "design" a message. Usually for content and clarity. However, it has gotten out of hand and now you get a complete website through your inbox without heads or tails.

You can write a message for content and clarity.

HTML email. There's the problem right there.

At least now you can send a Game of Pong coded in CSS (*) . That'll keep the recipient busy, especially the inner child in each of the recipients.

(*) Any takers?

Round here, plain text has always ruled the roost. 72 characters wide, properly formatted signature separator, 4 lines of a signature at most and absolutely no damn HTML anywhere.

Yes, I'm old.

And:

the flow

breaks up

Top-posting

I recently got asked why I don't top post. Apparently, it makes my brief, quoted e-mails harder to read.

Outlook has an awful lot of lost productivity to answer for!

Yes, I'm old.

Join the club.

Oh, never mind, you already joined. You're reading and writing El Reg comments...

By and large I tend to agree with you but I must say that I like MailMate's use of Markdown to HTML conversion as a halfway house. I still only write and see plaintext but I can understand the desire for a limited amount of styling in some situations, largely in the way we've been doing for years.

An email message which contains un-sizeable text, usually in an image, which can't be reformatted to fit in a narrower window *and still remain readable* is broken.

Raw seven-bit ascii, please, with _italic_ and *bold*. No more is ever necessary.

Images should always be attachments; no disagreement there. But I find being restricted to 7-bit ASCII a pain when I relatively frequently communicate in languages that characters outside ASCII's limited range.

If the tables etc make the emails suitable for screen readers to present the right information, then it seems a good thing?

Outlook for Mac, each time you run Outlook, first time you use an emoji or receive an email with an emoji in it, results in a spinning beachball for almost a minute as it does, er, something. It's not like they could just use the Apple emoji font... oh well.

Good advice all round.

Outlook for Mac is crippled not least when it comes to connecting to Exchange servers outside the DMZ. Documentation on this handily points to some Windows Proxy settings. It also, ahem, struggles with shared calendars. And let's face it shared calendars is one of the main selling points of Outlook because we all know how shit an e-mail client it is.

So, Outlook for Mac, just don't do it. It's a pity because Excel, Word and Powerpoint for Mac are pretty solid.

" the email client chokes when dealing with complex tables. An example of Uber receipt emails... "

Some points to consider:

[1] why should a receipt require a complex table to format it?

[2] I have received emails recently containing nested table cells up to (in one case) 20 layers deep, and almost all of the outer layers were empty of anything other than more table cells;

[3] a lot of supposedly HTML emails aren't. One received today contained an HTML table, but no outer tags or head.

It's not surprising that its hard to interpret "html"of this kind.

Maybe because you are in the 1990s and css hasn't been invented yet?

>[1] why should a receipt require a complex table to format it?

Because they don't actually want people to read and/or print out the receipt.

Don't know about Uber receipts, but Dunelm (and some other retailers) have done some stupid formatting in their receipt emails so that they fail the WYSIWYG printing test (ie. what you see on screen should be what you see in print).

Personally, when a receipt, e-ticket or other document where there is a reasonable expectation people print a copy, cannot be readily WYSIWYG printed it is a failure in the webpage design. I report these everytime, so the worst offenders have had multiple fault reports over the years.

Yes I know there are webpage capture utilities - I often have to resort to using them, but it is still a webpage design failure.

My question would be why this is being embedded in the email body as a table and not sent as a simple attachment?

Very few 'pretty' emails make it through all the various transition layers without something going askew (why else would they always include that 'Read in Web Browser' button) so how about you take a chill pill and use old-skool methods which just work. Small block of text to explain what the mail is about and attachments to hold the crayon department presentations

"why else would they always include that 'Read in Web Browser' button"

So that those who (as the senders see it) haven't worked out how to avoid reading emails in plain text won't be denied the opportunity to see the sender's latest brain fart in all its mult-icoloured, multi-font, flashing, Comic Sans glory. After all they took so much time putting it together it would be a shame to miss it.

Yes, marketing departments really think you're interested.

It also means they can track those of us who block tracking beacons in their e-mails…

What's needed isn't an email client that attempts to render HTML. What's needed is one that autoreplies with a message that the email has been delete, please resend in plain text.

No, scrub that as a client. What's needed is a server that bounces the message. Also one which bounces if the ReplyTo: is noreply or the message contains text to that effect.

I'm sure that Microsoft will fix this problem, it probably only needs a minor and quick code rewrite to skip part of the processing ... and that might make phishing and other deliveries a little easier.

I always see "problems" like this as educational - how secure the world would be it we just supported text emails - LOL, it's not going to happen.

how secure the world would be it we just supported text emails

As long as URLs are plain text, not particularly secure at all.

You can tell users not to click on a link and definitely never copy a link to a browser. You can tell them again, it won't make a blind bit of difference, often it just needs one careless user.

I would expect a table with simple rows and columns to be handled easily. But accountants make things more difficult, when some table boxes are split and others are merged. I have every sympathy with any program trying to deal with some of the stuff I have seen.