will be auto updated to IE8 (IE9 will not run on XP so I guess until XP is dead IE8 will be the new lowest common denominator). Sorry this is a bit off topic, as this has no bearing on html emails because microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to use word as the rendering engine for html emails in outlook (go figure) the reason being that they were incapable of making their browser engine safe from attack, hence the numerous security issues that eventually killed off IE6 (amongst other things). Hey Christopher, no worries about being off topic -- it's good to talk. This is great news that I hadn't heard yet. And so soon after they gave up on IE6. Would you believe I still have problems with IE7 and IE8 -- especially around forms. But, at least the situation isn't as bad as when you had to design with IE6 in mind! In a perfect world there'd be no IE or Outlook! Great article, and it refreshed my brain after finding all of this out some years ago! I was asked by a client to send a relatively simply HTML email out to a small list so I wrote the email as an HTML file (as I would for the web!) but as you've guessed, it didn't work. Writing these sorts of emails in Outlook is actually like going back to your old, bad web writing skills we all possessed 15 years ago! So thanks for the