html email & background images

[Force Flow]

Is there a way to ensure that a background image is downloaded/displayed in an html email?

I've tried the html background="http://your.image.here" tag and the inline CSS tag:style="background-image url(http://your.image.here); background-repeat: repeat;"

Neither method seems to work well across multiple email clients / webmail services. I even tried implementing both at the same time, but that didn't seem to help any.

Any ideas?

[Tailslide]

It's my understanding that most email clients have images turned off as standard so you're having to rely on users having their images switched on to get this to work.

[Force Flow]

That's what I was thinking. oh well.

Thanks