Xbox Newsletter and Outlook 2007

I find it continually funny that the Xbox 360 newsletter can’t be read properly in Outlook 2007.

This is because Microsoft have severely limited the HTML rendering component of Outlook 2007’s mail reader. There’s a billion articles about it; Ars Technica have a decent writeup, but the basic problem is that Outlook 2007 users the MS Word HTML viewer.

The practical upshot of all this is that if you’re trying to send HTML emails (like the Xbox newsletter), you’re really, really limited if you actually want Outlook 2007 users to be able to read your newsletter.

I first ran into this problem when subscribers of the GameArena newsletter starting complaining about getting black text on a dark blue background. Eventually I discovered that they were all using the new whiz-bang Outlook 2007.

I assume the Xbox team have decided that there’s more people using non-Outlook 2007 clients to justify giving them a busted-ass newsletter and forcing them to click off to read it online if they want to actually see what’s going on.

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