Upgrading Mac has messed up my email

October 7, 2024 1:54 PM

I upgraded my iMac to Sequoia yesterday, and now when I open my email, I'm having trouble seeing images and I get this bar at the top of the messages saying "Your network preferences prevent content from loading privately" and there's a button to "load content directly." I'm having to hit the button on every freaking email because I can't seem to find these mysterious network preferences.

I use the Mac Mail program for a personal Gmail account and a work account, also through Gmail. I had no trouble after I upgraded getting my Mail to work yesterday, but today, when I logged in, I kept getting this message. Obviously, I chose something in the upgrade that is causing this? I never know what half the things they ask me to do (one reason I hardly ever upgrade, I guess) mean, and I don't remember making any weird choices yesterday, but my brain is swiss cheese these days so I suppose I could have messed something up.

I just want to set it so that when I get an email on either account, the images within them load. I don't want to keep having to press a button for each individual message. But I've looked at Network in the system settings, and I cannot find anything about email or settings that would load/not load content.

I'm a moron about computers these days, so I'm not even sure if I'm making sense with this, but if this rings any bells, I'd be grateful for the help.

posted by kitten kaboodle to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Don't worry, this is obscure.

There's a marketing trick to put an image in email that lets the sender know when you read it and where you were (via IP address).

Apple put the toggle to always show images (and other remote content) under the Privacy tab of Mail's cmd-[dot] preferences, called "Protect Mail Activity" and "Block All Remote Content." See this support discussion.
posted by k3ninho at 2:19 PM on October 7 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Holy moly, I spent hours on this and in less than 20 minutes, you solved my problem! Thank you so much. I guess I appreciate the thought behind their choice of that control, but man, they really should have explained it somewhere. Typical @#@%#& Apple.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 2:59 PM on October 7 [2 favorites]

You might consider switching to a better email client. Thunderbird also has remote image loading turned off by default, but it gives you obvious ways to load them for this one mail, or always load them for this specific sender, or always load all of them.

Thunderbird will also look and work pretty much the same on any OS you run it on, which saves you from having your usual workflows disrupted by OS changes and/or upgrades.
posted by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on October 8