Can you do WEBP images in email?

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.