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Where did my image go?
March 30, 2006 1:03 PM   RSS feed for this thread Subscribe

How do you make a jpg or pdf image visible when you are sending out a electronic mail merge?

I'm trying to send out an announcement with an visible image using an e-mail merge. Each time I perform a test the image is not visible. Tried sending a jpg. and a pdf. image, but each time I've done it only the text I sent with the image appeared. Any clues on where I've gone wrong or a better way to do this?
posted by beatnik808 to computers & internet (9 comments total)
What Operating system, merge software used, etc, would help...
posted by unixrat at 1:18 PM on March 30, 2006


You can use basic HTML in the email, but you should be aware that Outlook, since 2003, automatically blocks downloading pictures in emails by default, and requires the recipient to manually download them by clicking a menu option. This is to prevent image trackers and other elements, along with porn.
posted by disillusioned at 1:30 PM on March 30, 2006


Thunderbird similarly blocks images.
posted by mendel at 1:38 PM on March 30, 2006


Oh, also: I don't think anyone really considers PDF files "images" any more than people consider Word documents to be images. Expect that your PDF files will only show up as attached files.
posted by mendel at 1:39 PM on March 30, 2006


OS: Windows 2K Professional and the version of MS Word 2000
posted by beatnik808 at 1:45 PM on March 30, 2006


(this is a programmery response, not a "click here to do stuff" response sorry)

Thunderbird always blocks remote images, and it sanitises what it thinks is spam/phishing through an html filter that removes images.

I think however that most email clients will display inline images (read: multi-part mime emails) which are different because they're in the email. This way the concerns about loading a remote image (and therefore being tracked, possibly by spammers) are negated.

Could you post the raw source/headers of the examples you've received so we can see?

The email ends up looking like an http stream,
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="PIEALT57206"
This is a mulipart message in mime format

--PIEALT57206

Content-Type: text/plain;Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit;
charset="iso-8859-1"

Plain text

--PIEALT57206

Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary="PIEREL57206"

--PIEREL57206

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Transfer-Encoding:8bit

<html>
<body>
sdfsdf sdfsdf sdf <img src="../CID:Image9"/>
</body>
</html>

--PIEREL57206

Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="logo.jpg"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Description: "Image num.9"
Content-ID: Image9

(base64 encoded image)


--PIEREL57206--

--PIEALT57206--

See http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/9.html for an example.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2046.html
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2045.html

I don't know any email program that displays inline PDFs. And I don't know shit about Outlook [Express].
posted by holloway at 2:17 PM on March 30, 2006


I don't know any email program that displays inline PDFs.

Apple's mail.app does.
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:47 PM on March 30, 2006


If you are using Microsoft Outlook, you need to make sure that you don't have Microsoft Word set as your email editor. Go to Tools> Options> Mail Format> and deselect either button. You'll also want to ensure that you are sending out messages in HTML under the same tab. Word has its own special, slightly retarded version of HTML that it uses that consistently munges up any non-Word created HTML that goes out, with images usually being the first part to go.

I also recommend that instead of having the .jpg attached, you reference it through the web, using the IMG SRC tag and uploading it to a location like http://www.mycompany.com/images/email/logo.jpg or whatever. This means that it won't get removed by filters and it's generally faster loading, which should be a concern.

Don't try to insert a .pdf inline. It only ends in tears.

This is what I can think of off the top of my head. I work for these guys right now and the High Impact eMail product really does do a good job when it's working, which is most of the time.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 3:33 PM on March 30, 2006


beaucompkevin: yeah but he's asking how to make it appear, therefore referencing images through the web isn't ok.

beatnik808: I don't know which email software makes use of multi-part mime emails (I've only made them in software) but that's the most reliable method.
posted by holloway at 3:12 AM on March 31, 2006


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