
Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it - tortilla
http://fixoutlook.org/
======
snprbob86
Sad fact: Not going to happen anytime soon. Definitely not for Outlook 2010.

They turned to Word for HTML editing/rendering in Outlook 2007 because there
was no Internet Explorer team during development. IE7 was released in 2007,
but Office 2007 was in development since at least 2003. No IE team means there
was no one to send design change requests to. Office doesn't like being at the
mercy of other teams, so they break dependencies whenever possible. The lack
of an IE team was a perfect example of why this is a successful practice for
them.

Word offers a significantly better editing experience and most email clients
only render a small subset of standard HTML anyway. Gmail, for example, throws
away all headers including CSS. It was a perfectly reasonable cost/benefit
trade off for the Outlook team to switch to an editor and renderer they could
directly change or influence. There wasn't a big loss of compatability, but
there was some. Most HTML email in actual usage renders the same between
Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 because they would have to be written to the
lowest common denominator in order to render correctly in most other mail
clients as well.

Outlook 2007 added DRM to emails which, besides being the most annoying thing
ever, was a feature highly demanded by customers. This feature is based on
Word's DRM.

So, putting on my Microsoft PM hat... let's do a cost benefit analysis of
switching Outlook to use the IE8 rendering engine:

Benefits:

1) HTML email authors (who don't pay us anything, by the way) will have a
slightly easier time now.

2) HTML email authors will have a significantly easier time in the distant
future.

Costs:

1) Second release to break HTML mail compatability in a row.

2) Will need to re-implement DRM. This includes a full battery of security
reviews.

3) Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements.

4) Once again at the mercy of the IE8 team, who already have a huge backlog of
work and probably don't care about our DCRs.

 _shrug_ Not going to happen in 2010. Probably won't happen in the next
release either. When some version of IE supports 100% of all standards and is
as fast as a hypothetical future Chrome, such that they have time to deal with
the Outlook team, then maaaybe, just maybe they can tackle this... two
releases of Office later.... If you're lucky.

~~~
andreyf
_Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements_

This is something that blows my mind. How can we have WYSIWYG editing
functionality since the 70's, and when "the web" comes along, we decide to
build everything on top of HTML/CSS, which is insanely hard to implement
WYSIWYG on top of? Ditto for drag/drop and _right click_ for God's sake.

~~~
plesn
Naïve question I'm genuinely asking my self: why?

What is the reason it is so difficult to implement WYSIWYG not top of HTML/CSS
(i kind of feal it thinking at latex,but can't put a reason other than
"organisation of the source")? on top of which kind of serialisable
representation would it be easier, is there any..?

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chaosmachine
Sending webpages as email is broken — let's not do it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This is basically the attitude of the kmail developers - html email is bad.

Who could possibly ever want to send a link or photo to someone in an email.
Everyone should be forced to have green console text on a black background.

Why can't they just use the IE8 rendering engine?

~~~
extension
Images can be attached to an email without HTML and URLs that appear in
text/plain emails are "linkified" by most readers.

The original MIME specification included an "enriched text" subtype which was
essentially an HTML subset that was easy to implement safely and served most
purposes for person-to-person communication.

MIME allows absolutely anything to be embedded in an email, but the standard
explicitly discourages the use of HTML as the message body. The argument for
standard compliant HTML support in all email clients is fairly weak
considering it shouldn't be there at all.

~~~
ibsulon
How do I send email in 24 different colors with pictures of my puppy, then?

A more serious restatement of the joke: Other than HTML email, there is no
functional way for the average computer user to send personal information with
the following properties:

1\. Rich text with embedded images (you know... HTML)

2\. available at work without running into firewall or security restrictions
(Websense)

3\. Easy enough to compete with email.

4\. Cheap enough to the end user to compete with email.

5\. Secure enough to allay concerns about personal information making it out
into the wild. (Never mind that email is easily interceptable: there is a
perception versus reality problem here.)

A web application isn't going to do it. It's just too painful to attach more
than two photos. A separate application isn't going to do it -- what corporate
IT department is going to install it?

Livejournal comes close for tech-savvy people, but it's not in the average
user's current skill level.

It's a fundamenally hard problem for social rather than technical reasons, and
that is why people use HTML in email, and that is why vendors support it.
Reducing it to a technical problem doesn't help.

~~~
extension
Some protocols cannot do certain things. This is an unfortunate fact of life.
If you find an ad-hoc workaround, don't be surprised if you have to jump
through hoops to make it work and don't blame someone for breaking it when it
was never supposed to work in the first place.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
But the situation is more like me using a hammer to knock screws in and then
screw makers changing the screws design so that it's harder to knock them in
with a hammer because "they were never designed for that".

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reconbot
I don't care too much about outlook and I use it every day - I just rather
plain text in email honestly, websites can stay html ;)

but that twitter wall looks amazing! Looks like he may have coded it up
himself - I know some activist groups would love to have one of those!

~~~
snprbob86
That twitter wall definitely is cool, but the pop-in moves the text and makes
it hard to read. It would be better if the new tweet tiles slid in, animated.
The speech bubbles should also stay fixed, but their tails should move along
with the animation.

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jwr
Are you kidding? Proper HTML rendering is the least of Outlook's problems.

I blame Outlook for the mess that E-mail became. Top-posting, citing entire
E-mails, people being unable to distinguish cited text from new text, unbroken
long line, unreadable and unformatted E-mails.

~~~
gaius
To be fair, the people who do that would do it with _any_ email client.
Remember, your typical corporate email user was never on Usenet, has never
been on a mailing list, genuinely doesn't know the difference between "reply"
and "reply all", etc. It just so happens that these people get given Outlook
and they use it. Or not, even, loads of senior managers, even at tech
companies, have their secretaries send email for them and would consider
reading 10 messages a day themselves "too much".

~~~
greyman
No, no, no. I use outlook at work, gmail for general email and also
thunderbird for one other email address. And I really didn't come across a
problem that email being coded in html tables.

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jsz0
Surely Microsoft can fix this problem by adding more toolbars and icons to the
GUI or by further degrading Outlook's ability to search large mailboxes. At
that point no one will even remember Word HTML rendering was an issue in the
first place.

~~~
jodrellblank
Good news - Microsoft fixed that search problem over two years ago by handling
it on the server in Exchange 2007, so you can search quickly from Outlook /
Outlook Web Access / your ActiveSync mobile (Windows Mobile / iPhone).

~~~
absconditus
What if I'm not connected to the server?

~~~
jodrellblank
Choice of Outlook's builtin search (Outlook 2007 with up to date service packs
and patches is better than Outlook 2007 as new, and better than Outlook 2003).

or Windows Desktop Search 4.

[http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktops...](http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/choose/windowssearch4.mspx)

Or, if you're pragmatic rather than MS locked, and want really fast search,
Google Desktop Search.

Or, if you're quite particular and want really really fast search, you can
with a bit of fiddling get Lookout to work in Outlook 2007.

But the benefit of using the Outlook builtin search is that it's the same UI
all the time. If you're connected to the server it searches on the server, if
not it doesn't.

NB: You can be out of the office and connected to the server if you use
Outlook/HTTPS as your connection type.

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prodigal_erik
I hope they realize there's no shortage of email clients which wouldn't render
that monstrosity the way they had in mind.

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nopassrecover
Heh Outlook's functionality has never been my problem (though Xobni makes it
better and Gmail handles conversations better). Instead, Outlook's performance
is the big issue.

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st3fan
What about "let's not use it" instead.

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fsniper
no html email please..

~~~
jodrellblank
No freedom please, someone else might abuse it.

No HTML email abuse, I agree with.

Not giving me the option to put a proper table in an email instead of a hand-
drawn ASCII bodge because you're afraid of junk mail, I don't agree with.

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philfreo
It's great that this is getting a lot of attention on Twitter. I just hope MS
is willing to listen enough to fix it...

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DanielStraight
That website is broken beyond belief.

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weegee
so don't use Outlook. problem solved.

