(Update below)
This week I was tasked with creating a nice simple HTML email for UNC that was delivered to approximately 200 people.
The design wasn’t very complex. It was essentially text laid on top of this graphic background:
When I program HTML emails, I usually go back to an ancient coding style (circa 2000). This means tables instead of CSS for the layout and primitive use of CSS applied as inline styles. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to get my email to work properly in Microsoft Outlook 2007.
The best way to put text on top of a graphic is to use a background image on a div or a table element. For my email I put it on a table element. But of course Outlook 2007 doesn’t support background images of any kind. Anywhere. For anything.
For some crazy reason, Microsoft decided to ditch having Internet Explorer render their HTML emails in Outlook and instead switched to Word’s renderer. That means that one of the world’s most popular email programs doesn’t understand basic HTML and CSS attributes that have been in use for nearly 10 years.
You can read more about this travesty at the Campaign Monitor Blog.
Update
The Campaign Monitor blog has a post detailing a method for using <body> tag background images in Outlook 2007. To be clear, this only works on the <body> tag.