css background Outlook 2007

Question

Hi,

I creating a program which send newsletter with a background image. It works fine on Office 2000-2003, thunderbird, but the background image does not show on Outlook 2007. I read that Microsoft changed the rendering engine and did not support the background css property (it is possible but only applied to the Body).

Is it achievable to create an email which will render like that : http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?a7905f7d16.png on Outlook 2007 ?

What is the solution ?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Shouldn't be too hard, as you're only needing one background image for the whole layout. Here is a blog post telling you how to get your background images working for the body.

Then just put the images and text inside a table and style it up with the correct width, and BAM, you're good to go (:

Answer 2

Not only has Outlook 2007 stopped the background image from showing in anything but the body element, apparently you have to be careful about how you set the styling of said background image as well. Perhaps this is your problem?

Campaign Monitor has a short post about it.

Answer 3

perhaps using a table and put a background on the table would work. either way, if you have styled it using css only, your in trouble and will most likely have to take a few steps back and do alot of the styling again.

fyi: www.fixoutlook.org

Answer 4

Outlook by default uses Trident, IE's engine for incoming mail, and Word HTML rendering engine for outgoing mail... Until Office 2007 (and some people hate it).

Now, it uses Word 2007's rendering, wich is rather lacking. On microsoft's page you can see that de body element doesn't support the style attribute. Because of this, you can't give a background to the body.

May be enclose everything in a styled div, instead of styling the body?