Dave Greiner, a member of the Email Standards Project, was distressed in 2007 when Microsoft decided to use Microsoft Word's relatively rudimentary technology to display HTML-encoded email in Outlook.
Facing the extension of that choice in the forthcoming Office 2010, he is shouting louder for change.
Greiner set up FixOutlook.org to urge everyone who agrees with his position to publicise their dismay on Twitter; more than 19,000 had done so by Wednesday.
Microsoft, while encouraging feedback on the matter, stood by its decision in a response published on the Microsoft Office team blog.
"We've made the decision to continue to use Word for creating email messages because we believe it's the best email authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years…Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning email messages," said William Kennedy, corporate vice-president of the Office communications and forms team. He added, "For email viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers."
Why the fuss? Microsoft previously used Internet Explorer's HTML rendering engine to display emails formatted with HTML, which was developed to describe web pages to browsers. This meant emails that looked as polished as web pages could be sent.
Microsoft has argued that most customers do not want an advanced web design tool for emails, and it has a point — Word can handle placement of graphical elements and such, although it is no desktop publisher.
For web pages, HTML is an imperfect standard, but it is recognised as authoritative. Microsoft argues that HTML in email is a different beast. "There is no widely recognised consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in email for interoperability," Kennedy said.
Greiner sees an "obvious solution", according to his blog post on the matter. "By updating the Word engine so it can compose and render standards-based HTML, all of these problems are solved. Microsoft can have its pie and eat it too," he said.
