Microsoft has confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

Update: Microsoft prove they’re listening by proudly hanging a mosaic of all our tweets on the wall at Redmond. Check out the pics.

Let’s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.

Join 27,528 others asking Microsoft to improve standards support and make sure you include fixoutlook.org in your tweet. We’ll pull together every tweet that includes the link here to give Microsoft a unified message from the community.

This rolling wall of tweets shows the design community’s real-time response to Microsoft abandoning web standards and using Word to render HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

Any tweets that mention fixoutlook will be displayed here to provide a single, united message to Microsoft in the hope they rethink this decision. You can read why this change is so important here.

Who built the site?

This site is the brainchild of the Email Standards Project, an organisation working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

The site development was funded and managed by Campaign Monitor, email newsletter software for web designers, and was built by Newism, an Australian web design and development company.