James Cridland

Can you do WEBP images in email?

Some colourful Australian stamps

WEBP images are supported by every email browser these days, so you’d have assumed everything was good for email as well.

Er - no.

For a start, Google’s Gmail doesn’t support Google’s WEBP format properly, and turns them into JPEG. That’s fine, but it does mean that a WEBP with a transparent background won’t work very well.

But, more to the point, any user on Microsoft Outlook on Windows - and there are a lot of those - will just see a broken image, because, in a refrain familiar to many email developers, it’s Outlook and therefore doesn’t follow the standards.

So - want to use WEBP exclusively on a website? You can do that now (and this website does).

But - want to use WEBP in an email? Er, no. Not a chance.

This is posted here just in case anyone else thinks about making the same mistake.