June 25, 2009

Dave Greiner was distressed in 2007 when Microsoft decided to use Microsoft Word's relatively rudimentary technology to display HTML-encoded e-mail in Outlook. Now, facing the extension of that choice into the forthcoming Office 2010, he's agitating more loudly for change. .

Greiner, a member of the informal E-mail Standards Project group, set up a Web site called FixOutlook.org and urged everybody who agrees with his position to publicize their dismay on Twitter; more than 19,000 did so by Wednesday afternoon.

Microsoft, while encouraging feedback on the matter, stood by its decision in a response published on the Microsoft Office Team blog.

We've made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it's the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years...Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages," said William Kennedy, corporate vice president of the Office Communications and Forms Team. And, he added, "For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers."

Microsoft previously used Internet Explorer's HTML rendering engine to display e-mails that had been formatted with HyperText Markup Language, which was developed to describe Web pages to Web browsers. That meant sophisticated e-mails that looked as polished as Web pages could be sent.