You spent hours designing a beautiful email. It looks flawless in Gmail and Apple Mail. But when you test it in Outlook, the layout is shattered, the padding is gone, images are missing, and your buttons look like plain text links.
This is the most common frustration in email marketing. The problem isn't your design — it's the underlying infrastructure of how Outlook renders HTML. Here is the technical explanation and the exact fixes you need.
The Real Reason Outlook Breaks Emails
Since Outlook 2007, Microsoft made a controversial decision: instead of using Internet Explorer or Edge to
render HTML emails, it uses Microsoft Word. Word is a word processor, not a web browser. It has
zero support for modern CSS. If your email builder uses div tags, floats, or CSS
padding on containers, Word simply ignores them.
How to Fix Common Outlook Rendering Issues
1. Use Table-Based Layouts (Not Divs)
While web design moved away from tables in the 2000s, email design still relies on them for Outlook
compatibility. Instead of using CSS background colors and padding on The standard CSS Outlook blocks images by default. If your email is one giant image, the recipient sees a blank screen. Include
descriptive I hand-code bulletproof HTML email templates using table-based architecture and VML. They render
pixel-perfectly across 90+ email clients, including the dreaded Outlook desktop app.div elements for columns, use ,
, and . Apply padding directly to the cell.
2. Bulletproof Buttons
a tags do not work in Outlook. Your button will lose its
background and shrink. Use VML (Vector Markup Language) wrapped in MSO conditional comments to force Outlook to
render a clickable rectangle with background color.3. Fixing Background Images
background-image property is ignored by Outlook. Use VML v:rect and
v:fill tags inside an MSO conditional comment to embed the image natively.4. Image-to-Text Ratio & Alt Text
alt text for every image and maintain a 60/40 text-to-image ratio.Tired of Broken Email Templates?