mangled email signature...

February 20, 2009 1:59 PM

Why would a PNG, sent as part of an email signature, look compressed and distorted and generally horrible when included again in the recipient´s reply?

This is through MS Exchange but I think it´s more than one Exchange. Googling for Outlook´s image compression ´feature´ doesn´t return anything useful. I can send a sample mail to anyone who´s interested in helping. Of course I could make a GIF, but I wanted PNG, damnit! ;-)

Thanks!

posted by dance to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Because it's the recipient's Exchange server that's compressing the image- Firstclass does this as well.

You could try sending an email to yourself and seeing how it comes out.
posted by dunkadunc at 2:03 PM on February 20, 2009

Is the distorted image still a PNG? In my experience there's a handful of MS programs that tend convert images in jpegs with low compression for no good reason. I'm wondering if somewhere along the lines it's happening to your PNG.
(If you want to test it, feel free to shoot me an email. My address is in my profile)
posted by niles at 2:03 PM on February 20, 2009

I had the same problem when I was handling the email server of the company I worked for. One of the solutions that turned out to look the best was to host the logo on our own server and just link to it in an HTML signature. If I remember correctly, using a GIF eliminated the problem too, and was a great reason to convince everyone not to use fancy, colored backgrounds (yuck).
posted by halogen at 2:08 PM on February 20, 2009

Exchange servers will indeed recompress and rename included images, which has always seemed crazy to me.

Also, don't put a graphic in your e-mail signature. Not only can it make every single file you send look like it has an attachment, it's also... um... yucky and cheesy.

If you really have to do this, do halogen suggests and just use HTML e-mail with a fully-qualified path to the graphic. Bonus: you let people who turn off HTML e-mail ignore it. :)
posted by rokusan at 2:47 PM on February 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

all: thanks a lot, I'll use a GIF or host the image externally.

rokusan: I completely agree with you. Unfortunately, my organisation (or my organisation's identity consultant) hasn't left the choice up to me.
posted by dance at 8:22 AM on February 22, 2009