email oddness

December 14, 2007 2:58 AM

Mysteriously changing email image attachment?

I received an email yesterday from an individual promoting his business. In the email was a number of embedded image attachments which when clicked linked you to his various webpages.

When I received the email one of the images in the body of text was my company logo. I forwarded it to my colleagues who agreed it's use wasn't sanctioned by us so I replied asking him not to use our logo.

His reply today states that he didn't use our logo and sure enough when I look at it today our logo is no longer there but another one is.

However my colleagues all have a forwarded copy of the original with the company logo as do I in my sent mail folder.

What's going on here? We're using Mail on Mac Os X 2.11

posted by brautigan to computers & internet (6 comments total)

PS: In the original email the offending attachment is now 198.jpg. In my forwarded mail it is 198.gif
posted by brautigan at 3:00 AM on December 14, 2007

Sounds like he changed the HTML in his email when he replied.
posted by MiaWallace at 3:24 AM on December 14, 2007

But his original email, sitting in my inbox no longer has our logo in it, it has a new logo.
posted by brautigan at 3:30 AM on December 14, 2007

Are you sure the image was an attachment? If it's HTML mail, it's possible it's just an <img> element in the HTML source loading an image from a server he controls. If he changes that image, the mail that you see changes.

This doesn't explain why it hasn't changed in your colleagues' forwarded emails, but perhaps OS X Mail converts linked images to attachments when it forwards.
posted by enn at 3:59 AM on December 14, 2007

... perhaps OS X Mail converts linked images to attachments when it forwards.

It certainly used to - it copied the rendered mail to a new mail, adding the Forwarded: subject line and header. I remember discovering this when chasing down an issue on a friends iMac running 10.1 or 10.2.
posted by Pinback at 4:52 AM on December 14, 2007

Since it's HTML mail, could the old images be cached on your colleagues' web browsers? EVen though the site's changed, it may be possible that their mail client hasn't goneo ut and refreshed the content in the message yet.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 10:26 AM on December 14, 2007