Is there a workaround to ensure the image/event variable for a cart abandonment email comes through in Outlook?

Hello @Mallory_PCR,

Thanks for sharing your question with the Klaviyo Community!

You are absolutely correct that because Outlook uses Microsoft Word to render HTML/CSS, this may cause your emails to display off as detailed in the My Email Looks Different When Viewed in Microsoft Outlook Help Center Article. 

However, despite this, dynamic images should still be rendering within the emails. From my experience, images not be appear automatically within your Outlook mail clients if you have the Don't download pictures automatically in HTML e-mail messages or RSS items setting enabled. You can learn more about this setting and how to disable it for your Outlook client from the Block or unblock automatic picture downloads in email messages Microsoft Help Article. 

In additional, this can also occur when your emails are landing in the spam or junk folder. This is in order to protect the recipients from any malicious content if the inbox provider thinks the sender or message is suspicious. Similarly this behavior of images not appearing within Outlook, can also extend to Gmail, Yahoo, and other inbox providers and would just be a matter of adjusting the image settings in your inbox client. You can find instructions on how to adjust these settings for some of the major inbox providers in the resources below:

• Gmail: Turn images on or off in Gmail
• Yahoo: Block images in your incoming Yahoo Mail emails
• Apple: How to tell Mail never display images in the Junk folder?
• Verizon: Why are images within an email not automatically displayed?
• Xfinity: Images Not Showing in Xfinity Email

I hope this helps!

David