[Gmsh] Newbie: Howto ensure quality in narrow sites on multi-region example

[Anan Im]

Hi,
I am really new to gmsh and meshing and somewhat overwhelmed from the features I read in the manual and on wikipedia.


So provided a test case of a multi-region .step compound of two rectangles(regions), where one region is narrow. See picture.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vkw6b6cajz0nz09/compound_narrow.png?dl=0

Main-Question: How might I ensure the mesh quality on arbitrarily narror transitions?

-Does the algo take care of the size according to the geometry? 
-The aspect ratio is somewhat low at the narrow rectangle, is not it? 
-Is this so? How could I prevent that? 
-How might I enlittle the element size just only in the narrow component part?
-How do I make sure from the output that an option is effective instead of being hiddenly ignored. (maybe by appearance in the logs?) 
  -These are the options at least I played with in my example, but could not see that they had any effect:
    -string "Mesh.Smoothing=3;" #WHERE
    -string "General.Verbosity = 8;"#WHERE
    -string "Mesh.QualityType=2;" #What changed=
    -string "Mesh.Algorithm = 8" # Always get Delauney in the logs

This is the command line used:
Running: /usr/bin/gmsh /tmp/tmphXj7r3.step -2 -format unv -o /tmp/Compound005_Mesh.unv -algo netgen -optimize  -string "Geometry.OCCSewFaces=1; " -string "General.Verbosity = 8;"Info    : Running '/usr/bin/gmsh /tmp/tmphXj7r3.step -2 -format unv -o /tmp/Compound005_Mesh.unv -algo netgen -optimize -string Geometry.OCCSewFaces=1;  -string General.Verbosity = 8;' [Gmsh 2.8.3, 1 node, max. 2 threads]
Info    : Started on Tue Oct 27 23:07:29 2015

Thanks in advance for some initial help