A perrenial hole in Office security has been plugged in the upcoming 2007 release: IE has been replaced by Word as the HTML renderer for mails. It's not that Word doesn't have security problems of its own, but that most email worms are written to take advantage of the holes in IE instead. It should be <i>hours</i> before spammers adjust their content to this new development. Because of this, as noted in <a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8619.html" source="Ars Technica" title="Outlook 2007 change sends HTML email back to the future, for better and worse">Outlook 2007 change sends HTML email back...</a>, <iq>e-mails that use certain advanced HTML and CSS features will be somewhat degraded in appearance in Outlook 2007</iq>. Naturally, that depends on what you mean by "advanced"---users of background pictures and floating and positioned styles are out of luck---and "somewhat degraded"---content that expects to be positioned will be formatted down the page instead. Any other IE embedders out there, take note: Microsoft is officially too scared to use their own browser because of security reasons. They didn't exactly put it that way, phrasing is instead thusly: <bq>Microsoft's says that the change actually introduces stability in the end user experience, for previous versions of Outlook would render emails differently based on what version of IE was installed on a local system.</bq> <img attachment="o_vistaoffice.jpg" align="right" class="frame" caption="Outlook 2007 - Aero Glass/Vista">The status quo sounds horrible: some users saw a properly formatted version whereas others saw a slightly altered version (e.g. users of IE 5.x, which had less CSS support). Outlook 2007 guarantees that <i>everyone</i> has a poorly formatted and hard-to-read version, which introduces the kind of "stability" that we've come to know and love from our favorite monopolist. It's absolutely amazing what Microsoft seems unable to achieve with their armies of programmers: how hard would it be to get Word to understand the few missing CSS positioning properties? Are they really so terrified of touching their own source code? A pity, really. Recent exposure to the latest release of Outlook (2003) revealed it to be quite a top-notch email client in terms of usability. 2007 promises even more, as seen in the screenshot to the right. Outlook has an uphill battle if it wants to prove itself a secure email client---is it worth throwing away their hard-won usability and user-comfort in this quixotic pursuit?