Why does my email template look different in Outlook?

If you're a Microsoft Outlook user, you may notice the email templates you designed look different, or format in a weird way when viewed in Outlook vs another web based email client (Gmail, Hotmail, icloud, Yahoo)

The web based email clients, and Outlook, read email HTML differently, with Outlook using their own Word engine to do the rendering. Some of the differences in Outlook include, but are not limited to:

- No text shadow.
- No animated gifs.
- No CSS float or position.
- No background images in divs and table cells.
- No image borders.
- Problems with nested elements background colors.
- Poor support for CSS width and height.
- Poor support for padding and margin.

There are no established guidelines for Outlook email designs since different instances of Outlook can vary widely across different organizations and their security parameters. 

CartStacks email editor includes code that accounts for most Outlook formatting, however the best way to make the designs as friendly as possible would just be to test them thoroughly.