For some reason best known to themselves Microsoft have decided to use the HTML rendering engine from Word rather than IE7 to render HTML emails in Outlook 2007.
Amongst other things this means that if you put animated gifs in your emails then only the first frame is displayed. It also means that CSS takes a step back a few years. Basically emails that used to be fine with Outlook won’t work going forward.
Why?
1. Outlook creates HTML emails using Word, so maybe they thought it would be a good idea to read them using Word as well. As long as all emails are created by Outlook it would be fine.
2. There is some security reason I havn’t thought of. I still can’t think of one.
3. There is some deep technical reason why they couldn’t integrate IE7 and this is a last-minute kludge.
4. There is some legal reason to do with IE7 being part of the operating system (not a stong one this because Oulook must use all kinds of bits of the Operating System).
5. Microsoft hates us
Maybe this will get fixed in SP1. However the fix is likely to be a switch that allows you to use IE7 to render emails, switched off by default so none of your customers use it.
Bob Browning's blog 
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