Various industry blogs have been commenting on the upcoming release of MS Outlook; although still in beta testing, the word on the street is that Outlook 2010 will continue to use MS Word as the rendering engine (same as the current 2007 version.) This decision will continue to impact your email rendering; specifically your emails delivered to Outlook, users will NOT have support for:
- Background images (HTML or CSS)
- Animated GIFs
- Forms
- CSS floats or positioning
- Flash or other plug-ins

One of the best detailed write ups is posted on the Email Standards Project by Dave Greiner (Email Client News.) This post details more about the issues at hand and shows how these decisions will render emails going forward. The part that I find most interesting is the social media response (via Twitter.) Tons of interested parties have gone out to voice their opinion on http://fixoutlook.org/, you too can weigh in and possibly influence the release of Outlook 2010 (approximately a year away.)

This is yet another use of social media to group and influence change in our industry.