It’s our goal at Litmus to empower marketers to make better email.

We all receive a ton of email. We want to help make the emails you receive more beautiful, engaging, and relevant. So, over the past 10 years, we’ve created the tools and resources to enable marketers to do just that.

Thus far, we’ve operated without the email client manufacturers’ support. This comes as a surprise to many because we’ve accomplished so much. Our engineers have had to work around, hack, and reverse engineer our way to capture screenshots of your emails across all these platforms.

Today, all that’s changing. Litmus and Microsoft are teaming up to make email better for thousands of email marketers—and the hundreds of millions of people who use Microsoft Outlook.

Through the partnership, we’ll help Microsoft prioritize email rendering bugs in Outlook, identify issues faster, and announce improvements and fixes to the community.

Caitlin Hart, Program Manager at Microsoft, said,

We’re excited to partner with Litmus, who has an amazing user base of passionate email marketers and developers that can provide us with real world examples of rendering bugs and errors. This will allow us to better identify and prioritize rendering issues to work on improving rendering in Outlook.

This is big news. Microsoft is the first major email client to develop such an open relationship with the email marketing community, engaging face-to-face with the email designers in the trenches. This is a huge step in making email better for Microsoft users and marketers, and we hope other email providers follow suit.

This partnership has two major components:

A rendering bugs feedback loop New Microsoft email clients available for testing in Litmus

Rendering bugs feedback loop

Litmus will collect bug reports and rendering issues from the community. These will then be prioritized and reported directly to Microsoft engineers. We’ll work together to fix bugs and announce their resolution to the community.

New Microsoft email clients available for testing in Litmus

Microsoft is working with Litmus to support access and free testing in more Microsoft-powered email apps, including Windows Mail 10 and the Outlook app for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Litmus + Microsoft making email better together

Some might view this partnership as an odd decision, or even a self-destructive one.

From Litmus’ inception we’ve focused on having truly authentic conversations with customers. That includes genuinely empathizing with the people we are creating tools for. We wholeheartedly supported the Email Standards Project’s effort from 2007 to 2010 to create email coding standards. We even had a small hand in getting AOL’s Alto Mail app to support responsive design.

Simply put: Our customers want better email standards, so we do, too. You have to care about the “cause” more than the dollars and cents, otherwise your efforts ring false. Our cause has always been to “make email better.”

We couldn’t be more excited about this partnership, and want to thank the Microsoft team for joining the campaign to #MakeEmailBetter.

For more information on the partnership, including how to submit rendering bugs, visit our Microsoft partner page.

Learn more about this historic partnership →