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?
Word isn't much safer but at least it is under the Office team's control plus it's less widely deployed than IE was at the time. It also has way fewer features with regards to HTML rendering which helps reducing the attack surface.
On the other hand, as it's neither browser nor HTML editor, its HTML rendering capabilities are never improved because it's no priority.
And thus HTML mail is stuck at tables, font tags and spacer gifs for the rest of eternity. Thank you Microsoft.
(OTOH, whatever helps discourage HTML mails and encourage plain text is a good thing in my book. And now, get off my lawn)
HTML email has some use-cases as long as the HTML used is very limited, and that's exactly what Outlook provides. There's however no justification to turn email into a full on web page like Google wants. The longer Outlook's renderer is 'broken', the less likely we are to get abominations like Google's AMP email.
Ultimately, email really is a document and should remain that way. This is compatible with HTML, but completely incompatible with Javascript.
Edit: Wait a minute. Wouldn't these WebGL games need microtransaction ability? That's a must for any game company. Obviously we must be allowed to use the payment API in emails! So now the scams would be able to bill the user directly.
A more serious use case might be the architect sending models of the new building or the doctor sending MRIs. While those cases have practical issues like the recepient not being able to respond to it easily (move that wall!) and privacy, they also have interesting benefits like no need to login to some cloud and retention period controlled by the recepient. Sending as attachment of course works, but needs container formats to collect assets together and sandboxing in browsers for local files. As well as this being a media break, where I have to switch to a different tool to look at it then where the context is.
As for the latter, if we're going in that direction, we might as well go all the way and implement some COM-like thingy for the web, so users can attach multiple whatevers and work on them in the email. This seems more efficient than turning each email to a unique embedded app which can embed only one type + maybe attachments.
Despite all this being possible in Outlook-land, everyone I'm familiar with prefers opening the attachment and working in a separate window, but I guess some people would rather work inline?
You could be right, with a better implementation there would be more that choose to work that way. I still think the risk outweighs the possible limited benefit though.
It requires workarounds which include nesting divs inside of tables inside of conditional comments.
I’ve done many things but coding responsive emails has pushed my cognitive resources to the limit. Because of outlook.
I get the impression that most mail is currently sent using Outlook and read using Gmail, so there is kind of a detente where everything is just frozen.
How does this work? I mean it implies in some way a difference in the amount of reading Gmail users do and a difference in the amount of sending Outlook users do. That sounds weird.
Yes. This might be hard to grasp from an SV web dev perspective, but not all industries are just about shoving ads at people. The company I work for does not do mass mailing. We use email to actually communicate with actual people who wish to exchange actual money for our product. This often involves months of back and forth discussion, because our product is highly customized.
The company I worked at before that also did automated mailing was only doing it because lots lawyers and numerous members of some other professions that required alerts regarding the laws affecting their jobs had paid lots of money to receive that email (well lots of money for a service that included alerting by email among many other things), and that email was setup to handle Outlook requirements because most people who received it were doing so on their outlook mails, ditto the current banking solution - for us webmail must remain a secondary consideration.
Anyway, given your condescending response I must say you made a nice choice for a user name.
You can send/receive gmail using Outlook - in fact it's much nicer to read compared to Google's confusing Web UI, with the ... and things along those lines.
I see no scenario where this idea could succeed. Most businesses put their mails through sandboxes and whatnot. and a mail that looked like a chicken once, will look like a pile of bones at the time it reaches the receiver.
Well, we had mails that contained VBScript. Outlook users can actually execute these. I think Microsoft changed policies to default disallow for a lot of VB components about a year ago.
I would assume that it's not a simple technical change on their end.
It's 2019, and Office for Windows still uses Internet Explorer to render add-ins built with OfficeJS.
This is slated to be switched to Edge (regular edge, not the Chromium-based build) with Windows 1903 and a newer Office version, but damnit if my life isn't going to be hell debugging IE for a couple months.
It's due to launch in the next month. If you're interested email paul.odeon@milliner.app and I'll add you to the list to be notified when we launch!
It seems similar to a strategy they use more often, famously known as embrace, extend, and extinguish [1]:
1. Use some standard/specification
2. Accumulate lots of users with questionable strategies
3. Extend/break/deviate from the specification
4. Devs update software to cope with the undocumented Microsoft(c) behavior
5. There is no point in following the specification or standard anymore, since it won't work in practice anyway. Microsoft effectively dictates what devs do.
According to wiki, only Outlook 98 added support for HTML emails[0]. It's not difficult to find Outlook 97 users asking how to support HTML[1], so the wiki changelog doesn't seem to be wrong. Outlook 98 was released in June 1998. Outlook Express doesn't change this picture - version 4 didn't have HTML email support[2], and version 5 was only released in 1999. MS support date appears to be June 1998.
Meanwhile, Eudora 4.0 release announcement[3] at December 97 already mentions HTML support. So at the very least, Eudora had it first.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Outlook#cite_ref-11
[1] https://www.excelforum.com/excel-general/396121-outlook-97-m...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_4#Bundled_an...
[3] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/1997/12/08/qualcomm-s...
Rich HTML Messages - Users have the ability to view and compose rich HTML messages, using graphics and stylized text. Emails containing HTML look as if they would on a web browser and include graphics such as embedded images, tables and java applets.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_Express#History
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_4
I was also on Usenet at the time, and the garbage that OE produced was atrocious. And let's not get into top-posting.
(Now get off my lawn.)
What is "modern email"? If it's HTML based stuff, then I don't want it. I like my communication simple, because that makes it more reliable.