Comments on: email oddness

Question: email oddness

brautigan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 02:58:59 -0800

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

By: brautigan

brautigan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:00:13 -0800

PS: In the original email the offending attachment is now 198.jpg. In my forwarded mail it is 198.gif

By: MiaWallace

MiaWallace — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:24:19 -0800

Sounds like he changed the HTML in his email when he replied.

By: brautigan

brautigan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:30:37 -0800

But his original email, sitting in my inbox no longer has our logo in it, it has a new logo.

By: enn

enn — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:59:07 -0800

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.

By: Pinback

Pinback — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 04:52:43 -0800

... 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.

By: bottlebrushtree

bottlebrushtree — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:26:43 -0800

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.