Outlook 2007 & 2010 bug: Embedded images being cropped

I’ve just been creating the HTML for an Email to be sent out on behalf of a client and have found what appears to be a bug in Outlook 2007 & 2010 (which use the MS Word rendering engine) when using tall images in HTML Emails.

My HTML Email was created from a JPEG designed by a design agency which I simply sliced up in Photoshop to allow me to use one image as a hyperlink (we have to do this nowadays since Outlook 2007 and 2010 don’t support background images). Photoshop created 6 slices, the top 3 were 2056 pixels tall. I used the traditional, nasty table-based HTML for the Email as it tends to be more reliable on various Email clients which our Clients demand.

I found that Outlook 2007 and 2010 effectively cropped the top 3 images, cutting off the top 450 pixels or so…how odd!

I am wondering if the problem is absolute height (i.e. a lot of pixels) or aspect ratio. I will do some tests to find out when time permits.

There were 2 solutions I found:

Solution 1:
Use divs to format the HTML instead of tables but as I said previously, this is much more difficult to make reliable across various Email clients.

Solution 2:
Slice the images up into shorter dimensions, I ended up slicing the images to around 500px tall which seems to work absolutely fine.

I’d be very interested to hear if anyone else has experienced the same issue.

Hope that saves you some time…it took me about an hour of bug-chasing!