Our marketing department has provided us with png images of our logo to use in our Outlook signature blocks. Unfortunately, when we send email to certain clients, they receive a down sampled version of the logo which looks very bit-mapped and fuzzy. We’ve been trying to track down where the image compression is occurring and whether it is on our workstations, at our Exchange server or on the client’s end.
I came across another tip for Outlook 2003 that mentioned something along the lines of modifying the signature files in Word and how there are three versions of the signature file, one for each type of email possibility (html, rtf or text). So I started digging through those files and discovered in the html version of the signature file an IF statement:
Note, that image002.gif file is created from the png file, only it is in a compressed or down sampled form (from a 7k png to a 2k gif).
When we swapped out the gif file with a higher resolution sample in the Simple_files folder, then a 3rd image was created when the email was sent (looking suspiciously like the first gif … er rather, exactly like it), suggesting that the image file is created when the signature is used and/or as the email is sent.
This is more of curiosity than a necessity for a solution as we can create either a jpg or gif file and those are not “recreated” by Outlook, but does anyone know how or when that gif image is created from the png file and/or whether or not there is any way to control the compression settings? Also, again just a curiosity, does anyone know which mail programs use VML to display inline images (if that’s what’s going on here with a handful of our clients)?
