| Does Outlook Email Tell the Whole Story |
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| Monday, 04 June 2007 | |
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I encountered an interesting issue today with Microsoft Outlook 2007, which I found disturbing. I tried to contact the company via their support options, but ran into difficulties. I’ll save that rant for another day, as I wanted to get this issue documented. The problem is Outlook 2007 failed to display the last list item in a HTML email. Yet, if I viewed the source, I could see the entire message. In this instance, I noticed the omission, but it was only by luck I spotted the problem.
The story started when I drafted an email in Outlook 2007 to a friend for review. In the draft email, I presented three options. Once I typed the “1.” Outlook understood a list was involved and properly numbered the other two items and did the indentation. You can see the relevant part of my original email with the list of three items.  Click to enlarge Today, I got back the response to that email with the edits. The author also used Microsoft Outlook (Build 11.0.6353) to respond to my message. As you’ll see below, the author added descriptive text to the three options. As it happened, I had my notebook and desktop running side by side. Gmail was open on my notebook and my desktop was running Outlook 2007. My main email account runs in parallel since I use an email forwarder. This allows me to get the same email message delivered to multiple domains (Google and TimeAtlas). In Gmail, the message came through fine except for some spacing issues. I’ve highlighted the problem item in red.  Click to enlarge When I went to respond to the same email in Outlook 2007, I noticed option 3 was missing.  Click to enlarge What the Email Source Code ShowedI was perplexed as to what happened to the third option. Why was it displayed on one email provider and not on another? Since all the emails were created with Outlook, I would’ve expected Gmail to be the one with the missing text. If you view the source of the email message in a HTML editor, you do see the missing text. I’ve highlighted it in yellow to make it easier to see.  Click to enlarge I half expected with the extra code that Microsoft adds to HTML email messages, that the preview pane of my HTML editor would not show the third option. I was wrong. In this instance, it seems Outlook has a problem with its own code.  Click to enlarge How Big is the Issue?I would like to say this is an isolated incident with Outlook 2007 and lists. I did some online searching to see if others had reported a similar issue, but I didn’t see anything. Part of the problem is how do you know when something is missing if you’re not expecting it? You can’t expect the recipient to review the source code each time a list is involved. Maybe the final recipient would’ve noticed that the email mentioned 3 options and they only saw 2. The bottom line is I don’t know how big the issue is and I’m happy to let Microsoft do that evaluation. I do know that I send a lot emails with lists and I would be concerned if items dropped off like this and the recipient didn’t know. I would also be concerned if the final recipient of this email didn’t realize there were three options. Until I know better, I think I may continue the practice of telling people how many items are in the list. |
