need an Outlook 2007 expert

[Soylent Brice]

with 2003 you could format backgrounds with animated GIFs for your emails.

2007 will let you, but it ceases to be animated. how do i get it to be animated?

the only i've found on it was crap about downloads for a CSS something or other.

anyone know anything about this?

[ChromeFoundry]

1. Outlook 2007's rendering engine...

no longer supports animated gif images. It will display them as a static, first frame image. I'm not entirely certain why the Outlook development team decided to remove functionality from the product... my best guess is that Outlook pre-2007 used Internet Explorer for its rendering of HTML emails, and 2007 uses its own renderer.

This may be a wise move by MS, due to the rash of problems found in all versions of IE. Sorry I don't have a solution for you.

[Soylent Brice]

2. i read somewhere that businesses asked them to do that

because of security issues. i guess there were gifs that were "tainted", and they said it wasn't necessary to be productive to have animated gifs on corporate emails, even though some are required for specific tables and shit.

morons.

thanks anyways man. hope someone else has a magic answer. lol

[comrade snarky]

4. Yep, it was security

Malicious code can be appended to the script used to animate the gif. It's a really small script that lists the order and timing of the animation cells but it's still a script that runs automatically.

Some other email readers will still allow it but they are pretty rare these days and honestly, I'd advise against using them because it actually is a security hole. Sure you could maybe section it off to run in a secure memory location but Office is such a big mess I think Microsoft decided it wasn't worth the effort to secure.

I'm afraid that the animated gif in an email train has left the station and isn't coming back.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

3. You're right - Outlook 2007 renders emails now using Word

It's a security thing - I think that it was possible to embed executable code in the animated gif. I don't think that Flash files will play either, since Word can't render them.

My hunch is that part of the reason that Outlook won't render animated gif's or Flash is because Microsoft wants to push their own Silverlight technology (which kicks ass for developers, BTW).

Since Outlook is technically extensible, someone could create an Outlook "viewer" that implements the IE render engine to display the email. Seems like a lot of work, though, to let people send smiley faces.

[hobbit709]

5. Why use Outhouse?

There's plenty of better email programs out there.