Use of title attribute in HTML emails for Outlook

Question

I've been googling this for just over an hour now so I'm starting to lose the plot a little. It's already kind of answered but I'd like someone to say it definitively if possible :)

I'm writing HTML emails and was trying to use the title attribute on table cells e.g.

<td title="awesome title">sexy content</td>

The title does not display when you hover over the td in Outlook 2010. It works fine in various web based providers e.g. gmail and hotmail but I haven't been able to test other email clients yet.

Does anyone know if Outlook simply doesn't support the title attribute? Or is my Outlook banjaxed?

I have tried Googling but I couldn't find an absolute answer on the title attribute. Just a lot of debate over the usage of the alt attribute.

Answer 1

Unfortunately it's not supported. I can't find an 'official' list, but this one seems fairly definitive: https://www.outlook-apps.com/html-ignored-by-outlook/

All versions of Outlook from 2003 to 2016 use Word to render content, so a general rule is if you can't do it in Word, you probably can't do it in Outlook either.

I realise this is 2 years late...but the wonderful thing about HTML emails is that Outlook's failings will still be relevant in another 10 years.