Yes, in 2026, Outlook still renders mail through Word. Yes, it still strips half your CSS. Here's the short list of things it still breaks - and the conditional comment that fixes most of them in three lines.
The hit list
- Padding on anchor tags - silently ignored.
- Margin - ignored on most block elements.
- Background colors on table cells - works sometimes, depending on Outlook build.
- Border-radius - ignored, every version.
- Web fonts - ignored, falls back to Times New Roman.
- Dark mode - inverted incorrectly, often making text unreadable.
The fix
The fix has not changed in fifteen years and likely won't in the next fifteen.
- VML for buttons - so they render as proper rectangles with padding.
- Table-based padding - inside
<td>elements with explicit cellpadding. - A single MSO conditional - to swap the web font for an Outlook-safe fallback like Arial or Georgia.
Why we still build templates this way
Because Outlook still has 8% of the global email market - and in B2B that share rises to 30-40%. If your transactional or marketing email looks broken in Outlook, you lose that audience. Pixel-perfect HTML email isn't glamorous work, but it's the kind of work that quietly compounds.