Eseries / Communicators :: Company E71 Models Downloading Inline Images In Exchange?

Our company purchased 12 Nokia E71 phones and they are using exchange for e-mails. What is happening is that our new company e-mail signature now includes our logo, our group logo and 6 small boxes which are hyperlinked to redirect back to our corporate site when clicked on. I have brought the overall signature as far down as 120kbs which is fine for a desktop email client, but when staff are using their phone to open up an internal e-mail which contains the signature, the phone hangs for about 1min with a progress bar that simply states "opening". This is a concern for the company as it would mean higher data charges for field users.

I assumed that the phone only read e-mails in plain text, but appears to be downloading the whole message (I think). When I open the test email and see the message details on the phone...the Nokia says 24kb. am I right in thinking that the phone is not in fact downloading the full message but only the text portion which is 24kb's??