Sad fact: Not going to happen anytime soon. Definitely not for Outlook 2010. They turned to Word for HTML editing/rendering in Outlook 2007 because there was n

Sad fact: Not going to happen anytime soon. Definitely not for Outlook 2010. They turned to Word for HTML editing/rendering in Outlook 2007 because there was no Internet Explorer team during development. IE7 was released in 2007, but Office 2007 was in development since at least 2003. No IE team means there was no one to send design change requests to. Office doesn't like being at the mercy of other teams, so they break dependencies whenever possible. The lack of an IE team was a perfect example of why this is a successful practice for them. Word offers a significantly better editing experience and most email clients only render a small subset of standard HTML anyway. Gmail, for example, throws away all headers including CSS. It was a perfectly reasonable cost/benefit trade off for the Outlook team to switch to an editor and renderer they could directly change or influence. There wasn't a big loss of compatability, but there was some. Most HTML email in actual usage renders the same between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 because they would have to be written to the lowest common denominator in order to render correctly in most other mail clients as well. Outlook 2007 added DRM to emails which, besides being the most annoying thing ever, was a feature highly demanded by customers. This feature is based on Word's DRM. So, putting on my Microsoft PM hat... let's do a cost benefit analysis of switching Outlook to use the IE8 rendering engine: Benefits: 1) HTML email authors (who don't pay us anything, by the way) will have a slightly easier time now. 2) HTML email authors will have a significantly easier time in the distant future. Costs: 1) Second release to break HTML mail compatability in a row. 2) Will need to re-implement DRM. This includes a full battery of security reviews. 3) Will need to re-implement all recent editing improvements. 4) Once again at the mercy of the IE8 team, who already have a huge backlog of work and probably don't care about our DCRs. shrug Not going to happen in 2010. Probably won't happen in the next release either. When some version of IE supports 100% of all standards and is as fast as a hypothetical future Chrome, such that they have time to deal with the Outlook team, then maaaybe, just maybe they can tackle this... two releases of Office later.... If you're lucky.