Forum Moderators: buckworks
As a matter of fact, I blocked/disabled the automatic preview function for image-urls in my own outlook-express mail client for security reasons (?). Thus most newsletters I receive myself (like from amazon and others), are displayed in a fairly ugly way, whereas embeddded images, which I sometimes receive from my customers, are shown perfectly fine.
On the other hand, in another thread I read about some problems with php-mailer-embedded images under different operating-systems, eg apple mac, but I must admit I did not fully understand what it really was about, technically. A first test to some friends revealed, that the test-mail did not display the images in thunderbird, but I didn't figure out, yet, what the reason was.
What are you experiences with this issue, particularly with respect to different operating systems and mail clients? Do you know about any statistics on how most internet users configured their mail-client with respect to images? What techniques do you use? How are images generally viewed and accepted by your customers?
Thunderbird has several modes of showing formatted e-mails: "full HTML", "simplified HTML", "text only". You can test how your messages look like switching between these modes.
Most web-based e-mail clients do not show HTML/images at all. That would be bad news, but there is a possibility to embed several MIME-types into single e-mail.
If you include text and HTML simultaneously, web-based e-mail clients (and Thunderbird in "text-only" mode) will show simplified text-only e-mail part (without images, tables, etc). You can include a link to web-stored e-mail message into text-based message.
At the same time, mail-clients set up to show full-blown HTML will show nice-formatted e-mail messages.
jsinger, yes I contributed in that thread myself, but a link to another ww-thread [webmasterworld.com] posted by tedster somewehre above was quite interesting. An interesting quote form there posted by encyclo:
in many modern email programs, including later editions of Outlook and Outlook Express as well as alternative email clients such as Thunderbird and also some webmail services, all disable third-party images (ie. those called from a remote server) within messages by default. This is because remote images can be used to confirm email addresses as they act as a "beacon" if used with a unique ID for each message.
This is part of what I meant, but it refers to third-party-images, and what I wanted to know is, how most clients work with embedded images by default.
I know I have no influence on the way people configure their mail-client in particular, but I think most people leave the default settings as they are. Yes, I am planning to send multipart-messages covering both: A pure-text part and another html-part with two very small embedded images (100x100px).
