One of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in email creation for a designer is its regressive nature. Whilst the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and browser developers improve and enhance at an almost inhuman rate html mail delivery has kept its front foot firmly in the past.

The restrictiveness of its HTML4.01 foundations can cause many a headache, unavoidable use of tables for structure, forced ‘web-safe' colour schemes and so many essential present day CSS attributes unavailable. A beautifully crafted design in Photoshop can soon become a blocky unyielding behemoth, far from the designer's original concept.

So what preparation tasks can be taken onboard before working on that all important eshot or newsletter?

Unlike previous versions of Microsoft's email client, Outlook 2007 uses Word rather than Internet Explorer to read (or render) the content of HTML emails.

Unfortunately Word does not support the same design features as Internet Explorer so the appearance of emails using these features may suffer some degradation when viewed in Outlook 2007.

This change in how emails are rendered by Outlook 2007 has left many designers and marketers nervously contemplating its impact on email marketing and design.