Question

I am wondering if it is possible to serve a different image to particular email clients that don’t support animated gifs. I know it is possible to use PHP to dynamically generate an image.

So if there is something like User Agent strings that can be read when the email client sends a request to download the Dynamic Image i.e. <img src="http://myserver.com/someimage.php" /> then php could send a different image to the email clients that don’t support animated gifs.

Is this possible or is there a comparable work around for sniffing out animated gif support and serving up a alternative image?

Answer 1

Ok thanks to profitPHP who suggest image logging. I have come up with the below…

<?php 
// Find needle in User Agent Hay Stack
$useragent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$isLotus = strpos($useragent,'Lotus-Notes');
$isMsoffice = strpos($useragent,'MSOffice');

// Route request to supported image
if ($isLotus === false && $isMsoffice === false) {
    header('Content-type: image/gif');
    readfile('images/email-announcement_02.gif');
} else {
    header('Content-type: image/gif');
    readfile('images/noAnim_02.gif');   
}
?>

This will find the Lotus Notes or MS Outlook versions that do not support .GIF animations. You can change the readfile to be your own local files.

I have tested this on Outlook 2001-2010 and lotus Notes 6-8 and it serves the appropriate image to the appropriate version.