Miscrosoft in the past has had several serious security problems with its image decoders (you could craft a corrupted PNG or JPEG in such a way that it would overwrite executable code in memory when it tried to decode it… code to do things like, say, enable the Telnet server or clear your Administrator password). I don’t have the info at my fingertips, but there may have been such a latent bug in the CSS engine in Outlook which was not present in the IE CSS engine (two separate engines, two separate sets of exploits). Rather than fix it in Outlook, they may have just said “screw it, use IE’s engine even though it’s missing a few things”.

The above is pure speculation, but it’s the kind of thing that can lead to decisions like this.

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by Windows’ poor security model.

As for people who send mail with stationary… think about it, Outlook 2007 is a business application. It’s not for your grandma who likes sending some prettily formatted message through email, with digital flowers and music playing and so on. For the vast Outlook userbase therefore, there will be no noticable effect. And I feel safe reading my mail as a consequence, knowing I won’t get bitten by some in-HTML script that Microsoft hadn’t thought of yet.

But you really shouldn’t have to know or care what email reader anyone is using.

If the templates don’t work in at least 60% of the email readers, there’s no point in having them in the first place.

I’m still hoping that Outlook 2007 will get an update to support background-image.

Then, the Microsoft-users would still get the stationary, though not the texture below the text, Web standards would loose out, and we would all die a little inside.

Hoping that’s not the case, but looking at what the different kinds of email-clients support, that seems to be the logical route for Apple to take.

I know we all want Apple to take option #3, and take on all the rest of the world in a huge battle for Web Standards (with capitals) and win out — but…