You left out the most amazing part: they doubled down on the MS Word rendering engine in Office 2013. At one point there was a letter writing campaign to ask them to change their mind.

Unfortunately the template they used in the email failed to render on outlook...

<!-- [!mso] -->

That little comment is a life saver.

I've noticed that Outlook, particularly 2007+, will play nicely with CSS so long as your styles are only applied to table elements. Put some padding on a 'p' tag and you won't see anything happen.

Likewise mobile gmail on a phone browser will not render a responsive email. Not sure if ZURB has given that any attention or if they intended to focus on the rendering of native clients.

AFAIK there's no work-around for mobile GMail on a phone. I've been banging my head against it this week. Given up for now and left native Android/iOS mail app users having the better experience.

Check out Ink's block-grid (http://zurb.com/ink/docs.php#block-grid). It's a lifesaver for working with Gmail mobile. Alternatively, if you don't need Outlook support, ZURB's original responsive templates support Gmail mobile quite well (http://zurb.com/playground/responsive-email-templates).

Thank you for the explanation, that's insane.

It is very insane. You would think that after getting such a bad rep with IE that they would make sure they don't get themselves into that kind of situation again, but no. They keep releasing shitty software that holds the rest of the industry back. I never was a Microsoft hater, but in the past few weeks of writing HTML/CSS (if you can call it that) for Outlook support, I have cursed Outlook more than any other piece of software I can remember.

You can read more about it here: http://www.email-standards.org/blog/entry/microsoft-to-ignor...

I believe the motivation was that most Outlook users were at corporations who sent/received most of their emails from coworkers who also used Outlook.

What these users really wanted was the ability to edit and format their emails the same way they did in Word. Word really is a fantastic document editor/formatter, and I don't know of any html doc editor that comes close to the flexibility, ease, and power of Word.

So they traded standards for what people really wanted - email that they could format.

If I recall correctly - they did it for security reasons. i.e. Internet Explorer was so full of holes they thought the Word HTML rendered would be easier to keep secure.

In the sense that it did a lot less and thus presented a smaller attack surface, they were right.

Guess its a pity Microsoft never heard about sandboxing, eh?