Image quality when emailing from Word

[jstammer]

I frequently create emails in Word to send via email.

When I insert an image, the quality is very poor when it comes through
in Outlook. I realize that some compression thing is going on -- which
is a good thing -- to keep the file size down, but is there any way to
control the amount or type of compression?

Or are there any best practices on how to retain the highest quality of
an image when sending from Word as an email? I've tried JPG, PNG, GIF,
WMF, inserting, pasting, etc. with varying results, but none are
optimal.

Thank you.
Jodi