Why has a preview step been added to Send and Track in Outlook?

We knew one of our champions would ask this. :)

We have just completed a big upgrade of the mail engine system.  Short URLs are about to launch.  Plus, it gives us a bunch of new capabilities in the future like email scripting, long term throttling and more.

The Outlook plugin had several limitations that were causing us headaches.  We upgraded those to prepare for the future this new mail engine gives us.  The preview step has more control than the main window to check if there is internet access and do certain logic on the links and potentially tokens (future).

Additionally, there were special technical circumstances that forced us to take the approach we did.  I can't discuss those, unfortunately, but this was the most elegant solution we could conceive.

I know it has limited value to the user and requires the extra click, but given all of the factors, it was a choice we had to make.  I know you want more detail, but rest assured, we are trying to make the best experience possible given the technical realities.

Thanks Glen, support of tokens and the other enhancements you mentioned are a reasonable tradeoff for the extra step, if we won't have to wait very long for them.  Will sales email performance reports (e.g. delivered, opened, clicked) and/or the ability to differentiate Email Add-in emails from Sales Insight emails in filters and triggers be possible as a result of this as well?

It's really hard to tell how soon and what functionality.  The Outlook plugin doesn't get updated that frequently.  Probably the next pass will get Outlook 2013 support and maybe some of the other stuff.  Arjun is the PM and right now upgrades are on the long term roadmap (2014+), not the short term (2013).