As it turns out, email clients that use the Word 2007 rendering engine (ie. Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010) have inherited the Word 2007 image height limit of 18 inches.

This is nice to know if you’re working in Word, but how about when you’re designing for email? We ran a test and found out that Outlook ‘07 and Outlook ‘10 truncate the upper portion of all images higher than 1728px from the top-down. So, if your image is 250px longer than the 1728px limit, 250px will get lopped off the top. Take a look at the screenshots below to see this in action:

Outlook 2003 (and all other major email clients)

Outlook 2007 & Outlook 2010

You may be wondering, “Who adds images larger than 1728px high to their emails?” Well, sometimes it happens (images says more than a 1000 words and so on)… So before you warm up your scrollbar, don’t forget that Outlook has its limits.

Have you ever thought about why you receive so much spam every day (for me it averages between 20 and 50 messages a day even after SpamAssassin has done its filtering)? Well, you can blame the 29 percent of Internet users that admit to purchasing items from spam email, according to a recent survey. Often these goods are pirated, counterfeit, or cheap knock-off’s that would be difficult to come by through the legitimate market.

More than 150 billion spam messages circulate daily, accounting for more than 85 percent of the total number of emails sent throughout the world. The sheer volume of spam consumes an enormous amount of bandwidth and remains one of the Internet’s biggest security problems.

And there’s little incentive to stop the spam. Recent FBI prosecutions of “bot-herders” suggest that the going rate is as little as $5 to $10 per million messages. Response rates are generally low – approximately 10 purchases are made for every million spam messages sent – but enough people purchase from spam to make it worthwhile for spammers to continue waging battle on your “Junk” folder in the hopes that one will slip through into your Inbox.

The top spam sellers include sexual enhancement pills, software, “adult material” and luxury items such as watches and jewellery.

The survey of Internet users was done by in June and July of 2008 by Marshal’s Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team. Marshal’s research indicates that just five botnets account for 80 percent of the world’s spam.

In 2004, only 20 percent of Internet users copped to purchasing items off spam email, according to a similar survey by Forrester Research. The increase in the last few years has led to a dramatic influx of spam email; reports indicate that global spam volumes doubled for the year ending June 2008 from the previous year’s levels.

The trend is not moving in the right direction as you’ve probably noticed. The question is how to fix it!? Maybe the ISP’s should be more active along with all hosting companies offering email services? What do you think could make this problem go away?

Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, reporting into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication. All the 50 employees will continue to innovate on and grow both the networked address book service and the next-generation social network, Pulse.

More information is found in the press release.