The first shot features William Kennedy, VP of Office and Jeanne Sheldon, VP of Word (nice shirt Jeanne) hanging out next to the mosaic’s new home in the Office team’s hallway.

This second photo was taken at the entrance to the Microsoft campus and includes a number of Word and Outlook team members who have worked on HTML rendering in Office over the years.

I’ve got to give Microsoft an enormous amount of credit for this. They could have ignored our feedback completely, but instead proved they are genuinely listening to our feedback and are prepared to have a bit of fun doing it. Add to this the recent launch of MakeOfficeBetter.com by two Microsoft employees, and it becomes clear that these guys really do care about giving their customers the best experience possible.

While there is still no confirmation about what impact this will have on the rendering in Outlook, this is a big step for the Office team to take publicly. William and the rest of the Office team have assured me they will keep in touch as they plan their next release. You guys will be the first to hear if we have any news to share. In the mean time, let’s keep the feedback going by adding your vote for better HTML support.

Bravo Microsoft.

We were unsure if we would hear back from the Office team, but were pleasantly surprised today when a large package straight from Redmond arrived on our doorstep. William Kennedy, the Corporate VP of Office was kind enough to send a personal letter to us thanking us for our efforts. William even explained that the Fix Outlook mosaic was now on display in their hallway so the entire Office team can check it out.

William also mentioned that “improvements and changes in this area are something that the team is definitely considering for the future”. Only time will tell if Outlook will move towards better standards support, but this is certainly the strongest message on the subject we’ve had to date.

This is a brilliant result. Here’s the complete letter (emphasis ours).

I can’t thank William enough for not only ensuring our message is seen by the entire team, but for taking the time to let us know how much they appreciated our feedback.

To bring this great project to a close, we wanted to make sure the Outlook team had a constant reminder of just how strongly we all feel about their lack of standards support. Trending topics on Twitter come and go, we wanted something a little more permanent we could send their way.

The fixoutlook.org Mosaic

In his reply to the fixoutlook campaign, Microsoft’s William Kennedy told us that there “is no consensus” about what standards apply to email and that he’d work with the industry if a consensus arises. Luckily for us, these standards already exist. They’re called web standards.

To make sure William got the point, we figured we’d send him a “consensus” from 25,000 of us, many of who (myself included) are Outlook customers. From this idea, the fixoutlook.org mosaic was born. In a single image, it includes almost all of the 25,000 people who joined us in asking Microsoft to fix standards support in Outlook 2010.

Here’s a preview of the mosaic. You can click it for the full sized version, which is a rather large 20MB and might take a while to download.

We’ve used the different colored avatars from everyone who contributed to spell out a final message to Microsoft. We figured saying please this time couldn’t hurt our chances.

As I write this, the 2m x 1m mosaic is just boarding a plane on it’s way to Redmond, personally addressed to Mr Kennedy on behalf of everyone who contributed.

To give you an idea of scale, here’s a shot of us holding the mosaic.

A big final thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about the importance of the fixoutlook campaign. On a more personal note, it was a pleasure to be involved from start to finish, and hopefully it will contribute to making life easier for email designers and Outlook users alike.

We’re often asked for advice on how to get the best results given the current state of the email client market. Here’s our top picks to get you started with building an email that will work well for your readers right now. You’ll notice they are from Campaign Monitor, which is built by the same team that started the Email Standards Project (full disclosure achieved!).

Which CSS styles can I use in my emails?

Our email ACID test doesn’t cover everything, and it is more focused on individual, current clients. For the bigger picture see the Guide to CSS support in email clients (2008).

You may notice some differences, where support is spotty for certain elements and we’ve tested in different ways. Watch out for an expanded ACID test later this year to provide more clarity.

What are the best practices for designing emails?

For general advice on what to put into your emails, what not to, and how to approach it see the Email design guidelines.

Are there tested email layouts I can use?

To save time in working out a structure that does not fall apart in one of the popular email clients, you can start with free, tested email templates that you can take, modify and reuse.

Which email clients are people actually using?

At Campaign Monitor we’ve been collecting statistics from millions of emails sent out, and compiled an email client popularity report (the unsurprising news is that Outlook still dominates).

Thumbnail of the .Mac initial test

The much improved Mobile Me rendering

When we first tested .mac, it had a lot of problems. Our email ACID test did not render very well at all, and we ranked support overall as ‘Improvement Recommended’. This was slightly suprising given then excellent rendering abilities of the Mac desktop Mail client.

So after the release of the new Mobile Me, and after the associated outages and glitches, we were very keen to run the test again. The good news is that the results were dramatically improved. Nearly all of the previous problems had been corrected, and the email rendered almost perfectly.

Background colours and images are correct, positioning of elements works well, and even list images show up. The one oddity is what you can see in the thumbnail; headings. We found that while our H1 tag rendered perfectly, H2, H3 and below would not accept styling from a stylesheet in the head.

There’s no obvious explanation for why that would be the case, but during our testing and fiddling we were not able to get it to work at all. Lower level headings remained stubbornly unaffected by margins, background colors, padding and more.

Perhaps someone from the Mobile Me team can explain? Overall though, the rendering is hugely improved, and has earned an ‘Excellent’ rating. This is another great example of how webmail clients don’t need to render poorly.

Thanks to everyone who emailed us about Mobile Me, including Georg Stadler and Stefan Kremer who both sent in screengrabs.

View the full report for Mobile Me.

IBM has announced Lotus Notes for the iPhone will be released in 2008. According to the official site, it will “combine with the flexibility and connectivity of the Apple iPhone. To be built on the time tested IBM Lotus Domino Web Access infrastructure, users will be able to quickly access email, calendars, and contacts through the rich Apple iPhone user experience.”

The existing Apple Mail application built in to the iPhone does a very good job of rendering HTML and CSS, so we’ll be watching with interest to see how this new version of Notes does. If you have access to it, we’d love to hear from you once the product is released.

We've received a lot of requests for people to be able to test their own preferred email client, so here's your chance. Just add your email address (the one associated with the email client you want to test) to the list below, and we will send a copy of the ACID test to that address right away.

Please send me your email ACID test

We're always interested in hearing about email client support for HTML and CSS. In the future, we may well increase our official testing to include other clients too. Thanks again for your support of the Email Standards Project.

Just a quick update for those of you concerned about the spacing in HTML emails.  Our engineers have sleuthed out the problem, and a fix will be rolling out in the coming weeks. 

Thanks to the Yahoo! team for being open about these issues and for actively working on them — a model which other email client providers would do well to follow.