Outlook 2010 ignoring color on inline elements with dark background

[M-J-Robbins]

Outlook 2010 appears to be overriding color that is set on any inline elements that have a dark background-color.

<span style="background: #000;color: #f00">span</span>
We'd expect the above code to have a black background and red text. It does this on every other email client, but on Outlook 2010 it shows white text. Other versions of Outlook appear to work as expected.

This is only happening for inline elements, such as <span>, <a>, <strong>, <b>, <font>, etc. When applied to a. block element it works as expected.

This is only happening on very dark backgrounds, setting background:#333333 changes the text colour to white, setting background:#444444 keeps the text colour that has been set. I'm guessing this is an accessibility setting to maintain contrast on text, however even setting a light text colour with a good contrast ratio will still get changed.

This is an edge case, backgrounds are not often set on inline elements and this only happens with dark backgrounds. The most likely use case where we'd see this is on link buttons.

[M-J-Robbins]

This is only when the background is set directly on the inline element

	<div style="color:#f00;background: #000">
		test1
		<span style="color:#f00;background: #000">test2</span>
		<span style="background: #000">test3</span>
		<span style="color:#f00;">test4</span>
		<span>test5</span>
	</div>

In the above example, test2 and test3 are converted to white text, the others all stay red.

[M-J-Robbins]

I've run tests on all of these so far, and no luck yet
color
background
background-color
bgcolor=""
mso-color-alt
mso-color-index
mso-color-source
mso-fills-color
mso-foreground
mso-highlight
mso-pattern
mso-pattern-color
mso-scheme-fill-color
mso-shading
navbutton_background_color
font-color
mso-background