Why emails from GMail have formatting issues in Outlook?

At work we are starting to move over to Google Enterprise Apps. During the process we have come across email formatting issue when emails are sent to users on Outlook (2007).


The root cause of this issue seems to be with Outlook and it's poor HTML support. More specifically its poor support of CSS and inline styles.


As far as I can tell the GMail text editor applies font size using the style attribute on a <span> and font face using CSS by default which Outlook doesn't handle very well and applies a default size. The font face is applied using CSS which Outlook doesn't support very well (if at all) so Outlook uses what ever it has set as the default (may be Time New Roman).  

Using the 'Default Text Styling' lab helps with the main text. As long as you don't change the font size in the text editor.

e.g.:
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">asdasdasd</span>


Where as the Default Text Styling lab uses <font> which works better in Outlook


e.g.:
<font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif">asdasdasd</font></font>


You can see this by clicking view source in the web browser.

Any workarounds?

http://www.email-standards.org/

What is the Google "MayDay" update?

The label the SEO community have given some recent Google long-tail search algorithm changes. "MayDay" because it was spotted around the 1st May 2010. Below are some attributes of this change.

• Affects long-tail searches.
• An algorithmic change rather than a crawler or indexing.
• It's about how Google assess the best quality matches.
• Great content and authority are still valid.
• Nothing directly to do with the Caffeine update, side by side.
• Not a manual process, no humans involved, fully automated.
• Intended to be a permanent change.

Matt Cutts on the topic