Outlook taking a very long time to open emails that feature a backgrou

Mr Davo · 03 Jul 2012

Hi Everyone,

I am noticing that Outlook is very slow to open emails with background images which are placed into the body tag of a message. Usually when I create an email marketing campaign I give my email message a background picture by placing markup similar to the following into the body tag;

<body style="background-image: url('http://myserver/somepicture.jpg');>

Traditionally this has been fine, however over the last day I have noticed that Outlook takes a very long time to open these kinds of messages. I have had a look through my old email campaigns, and much to my surprise I have found messages which opened fine six months ago taking a long time to open.

This issue is happening on more than just my computer, as I have asked staff & customers about their Outlook experience, and some have even reported a complete crash of Outlook.

I am using Outlook 2010, however I think that Outlook 2007 is also being affected.

If anybody has any ideas on how I can fix this they will be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Davo

anandntvm · 03 Jul 2012

Can you quickly view the image when you manually navigate to http://myserver/somepicture.jpg using IE

Mr Davo · 03 Jul 2012

Hi,

Thanks for your response. Here is a link to the web page:

New Website

The markup on this web page is essentially the same as that used in the email campaign, with the exception that Outlook tends to use a set of custom rules when rendering html (effectively adding / removing some tags automatically).

This is the web page that I link to from the top tag line "Is this email not displaying properly? View it here"

Any further help will be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Davo

anandntvm · 04 Jul 2012

This is from your HTML code

<bodystyle="background-image: url('https://dl.dropbox.com/u/89221088/NewWebsite/bg_outer_body.jpg');">

I can view the above image and the above HTML site without any problem over IE.

I would suggest you to upload the picture bg_outer_body.jpg to the server where you host your main site and test the outlook issue. I think outlook is finding difficult to read from a secure site (https) due to some issue.

Mr Davo · 04 Jul 2012

Hi anandntvm,

Thank you for your responses.

I performed further diagnosis and came to the following conclusion -

Secure HTTP doesn't seem to have a negative effect on load times as best I can tell. However I think that there was a bit of a "trust" issue because my email body (mark-up) was coming from one server, and image resources were located on another.

Kind Regards,

Davo