Their Foundation Framework can assist you with building responsive emails that will work on any device even Outlook as stated on the front page of their website. You might know Zurb from a previous article on this blog where we discussed their Foundation Framework for creating ASP.Net MVC websites.

The following table lists the HTML tags that are not supported in Outlook e-mails / Word rendering engine: To avoid this, style your table cell ( ) elements as follows: Unsupported HTML tags

Speaking of Tables, text does not automatically wrap inside a table, which can cause some confusing results. HTML Tables will give you a predictable layout experience and will work in almost all e-mail clients. elements inside Outlook e-mails tend to have a mind of their own and behave erratically. For example, in order to set a table’s border style, use the following syntax: Use TablesĪlthough the general consensus with regards to using HTML tables for web page layout is to rather avoid them, this is not the case with Outlook e-mail design. You should avoid linking to external style sheets altogether as it will not work at all.

Some of the more obvious features that are not supported are:Īs a general rule of thumb, using inline styles are preferred over specifying your CSS inside a tag. There is a rather wide range of limitations imposed on Outlook email HTML due to the fact that the MS Word rendering engine is being used. What this means is that not all HTML elements are supported inside an Outlook e-mail body. In essence, the Word 2007 supports a subset of the HTML 4 specifications as well as a subset of the CSS specifications level 1. Word 2007 made significant advancements in the way it handled HTML and CSS and the Outlook team decided to combine both reading and composing of Outlook e-mail messages with one technology. For displaying / reading e-mail content, they employed the Internet Explorer rendering engine and used MS Word’s rendering engine for composing messages. In previous versions of Outlook, Microsoft employed two rendering engines. The primary reason that your carefully designed Outlook HTML e-mail templates might not always look exactly the same in an e-mail body as it does inside your browser, is because since Outlook 2007, the Microsoft Word 2007 rendering engine has been used to parse and render HTML inside Outlook e-mail messages.

If you’ve ever tried to design an attractive and somewhat complex e-mail message using Microsoft Outlook and HTML, chances are you very quickly realized that the Outlook mail message body format performs rather differently than a normal web browser.

Outlook developer guide