
Why Your Email Looks Broken in Outlook
Outlook renders HTML email with Microsoft Word's engine. Once you know that, most of the strange bugs stop being mysterious and start being predictable.
Category
6 articles in Design and Accessibility.

Outlook renders HTML email with Microsoft Word's engine. Once you know that, most of the strange bugs stop being mysterious and start being predictable.

Most of your list reads on a phone, held one-handed, in three seconds of attention. Design for that and the desktop version takes care of itself.

A large share of your recipients see your email before its images load, and some never load them at all. Design for that and your email works everywhere.

Plain text emails do not automatically get better deliverability — that myth has cost people a lot of design work. Here is what the evidence supports and when each format wins.

An inaccessible email is not a niche problem — it is an email a meaningful share of your list cannot read. Most of the fixes take minutes and improve deliverability as a side effect.

Roughly a third of your list reads in dark mode, and email clients each invert your design differently. Here is how to build one email that survives all of them.