html email with background-image style not shown

Question

I am creating an email template which has to display images from external website. I had placed some <img> tags for rendering the images and there are some <td> tags with background-image property set in inline css of the elements.

Now, when an email is received in outlook, the images are not displayed (this is expected as the images are not embedded). And I click the download images to see the images properly. The images in <IMG> tag are only shown and the background-image for the <TD> is not rendered.

Any views on solving this problem?

Thanks!

Answer 1

At last I found the answer.

Outlook 2007 does not use the Internet Explorer's rendering engine for loading HTML content. Instead it uses Word 2007 HTML and CSS capabilities.

Because of this CSS attributes such as background-image is not supported. And hence it's not possible to set a background image for HTML elements in outlook using standard CSS tags.

More info is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201(v=office.12).aspx