Microsoft takes e-mail design back 5 years

Despite Microsoft’s (“weak”) efforts in making Internet Explorer 7 more standards-compliant, the new version of Outlook ,which will be released next month, will stop using Internet Explorer’s engine to render pages, and instead, will use Microsoft Word’s rendering engine.

How bad is this? Well, I’ll show you how bad:

As stupid as this may sound, the first image is taken from Outlook 2000, and the second one by Outlook 2007. I never did any e-mail design back when I was designing professionally, but you can read the opinion of someone who has been on the field for many years:

Imagine for a second that the new version of IE7 killed off the majority of CSS support and only allowed table based layouts. The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that’s exactly what the new version of Outlook does to email designers.