If you do any development for email, you know what I’m talking about when I say that Outlook 2007 has a crap rendering engine for html emails. For some reason, in the 2007 version of this software, they strayed from their usual way of displaying html emails and use Word as their rendering engine. The result? You have to use tables for layout (let’s travel back to 1995, shall we?), CSS has issues, and background images are just unusable. Avoid gradients like the plague in your email design because Outlook will never make them look right and you’ll either have to display the entire email as an image (poor usability practice) or just be okay with the fact that users viewing your email in Outlook will not see the same thing that everyone else does.

There’s a great site out there, fixoutlook.org, that is making a plea to Microsoft to please change their mind about continuing to use this crap rendering engine in the next phase of their product for 2010. Visit the site, then tweet about it and include the url to become a part of this massive campaign to attempt to change their mind.