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What is MSO? [Email Template Outlook HTML]

can anyone tell me what is MSO?. I mean right now I'm studying email template HTML and I did it on Gmail and it works fine but when it comes to outlook it becomes weird. Especially the image part and the size and everything is just mess up.

I read a few here and there, blogs or articles or website but it seems that they use MSO to code it to fix the outlook output email template. Is it right? Why do we need to use MSO to configure and how to use it actually and what is it for actually?

I'm not too sure on this part but it is much help if you can explain to me about the outlook part of code in HTML.

Here is 1 example I read on the website but not too sure about it.

https://jasemiller.medium.com/a-fix-for-outlook-image-issues-in-html-email-campaigns-b8dd1c8f7d16

Why does Gmail be easier than outlook to get the output for email template HTML?

Solution

  • MSO is an acronym that stands for Microsoft Office. In the email world, it usuallys refers to one of the followings:

    1. Conditional comments. Using a special syntax created by Microsoft for Internet Explorer (supported up until IE 9) and then used inside Microsoft Outlook 2007 and above, you can create code that will only be available in the targeted versions of Outlook. For example, in the blog post you mention, they use an <!--[if mso]><![endif]--> conditional comment to create a table structure for Outlook only. You can read Microsoft’s documentation about conditional comments.
    2. mso specific styles properties. Those are CSS properties created by Microsoft and only supported by Word’s rendering engine. They come with a mso- prefix. They can be a variant of well known CSS properties (like mso-border-alt that is an alias of border in CSS) or something completely unique to Word (like mso-hide). Here’s a list of all styles supported by Outlook including mso- properties.

    The reason why Gmail might render your email better than Outlook is that the Outlooks on Windows (from 2007 to 2019) use Word’s rendering engine. And Word is not very good at rendering HTML and CSS. (In Can I email’s scoreboard, Outlook is ranked last why Gmail is currently ranked 22nd.) I wrote a detailed article last year to help make sense of Outlook’s rendering engine and I think it can help you.