Animated Gif in Outlook 2007

daveyboy_1ie

Hi,

I have searched extensivley and found no joy so I thought maybe I will ask here in case I am missing something.

Has anyone encountered the problem with animated gif's in Outlook 2007 & 2010? Apparantly Microsoft changed the way Outlook renders mails. Previous versions used IE and allowed gifs to be seen with no issues. However now with the newer versions they will not show, and only show the first frame of the gif. You can view these by clicking onn 'other Actions View in browser', however if the recipient did not how to do this then it pretty much means the mail is a waste of time.

Anyone ever see a work around for this?

Thanks in advance.

seamus

Why are you using an animated gif in an email?

Email clients have been moving towards minimalising HTML email rendering rather than enhancing it. Emails are for sending information, not images and movies, so the move is consistently towards supporting layouts and font styling, while removing any excess garbage like animated gif support, youtube embedding, flash, etc etc.

Outlook previously used the IE rendering engine for emails, but this caused a lot of problems. Not least leaving your email as another avenue for malicious attacks, but also any issue with the IE engine (such as a bad add-on) would have knock-on effects on the email client.

A more compact rendering engine also means that mails load and display faster.

MS Office is a big product and Microsoft want it to be able to stand on its own, separate to any dependencies on OS software.

The reason I've told you all this is because the general rule is that if you're doing something that involves embedding images or videos in an email, then you're doing it wrong.

No, there's generally no workaround for this. You can only work within the constraints of the rendering engine.

daveyboy_1ie

Thanks Seamus, I thought as much. I searched a lot as I said. I was asked my a Graphic Designer, who wanted to know if there was a work around, seemingly not.