Everything I read indicates that there really isn't a way to achieve what my firm wants, but I'm hoping I'm missing something. Our client development committee created a graphic signature for our emails and asked me to propagate and deploy it. Because we're still on Exchange 2003 and are always running close to our 75 GB information store limit, having hit it and crashed on more than one occasion, I created the signature using a link to the image on our web host and set GPO to force senders to send the link rather than a copy of the graphic.
Users would really like to send the graphic itself so it always shows, so I had to use the ALT text of the image to say what the graphic says, so that even if the receiving mail handler reads in plain text or doesn't automatically download images, the recipient would still see the content of the signature. However, there are several lines to that signature, and the returns only show in IE. When recipients use a web client through Firefox, the alt text just reads as one run on line.
I've played around with creating a text version, too, based on the idea that the MIME handling of Outlook would attach both and present whichever the receiving mail handler preferred. It still just displayed the alt text of the image. I tried modifying some PHP script, but that didn't work out in my test run. The DHTML pop-ups don't seem to be a good solution either since that means the recipient still needs to be reading HTML.
Is there any solution that will give my firm what it wants, that will show the text of the signature with returns if the image isn't downloaded?