Default image blocking continues to gather momentum

Published May 28, 2007 by David Greiner

Screenshot of the new AOL.com mail interfaceAOL recently updated their web-based software for all AOL.com and AIM.com email accounts. We've had a quick look around and even done some preliminary CSS testing. The good news is that CSS support is top notch, as in as good as Yahoo!, which was great to see. The not-so-good news was that images are now blocked by default for all unknown senders.

In the scheme of things, this isn't really that big a deal. Image blocking is the norm in most modern email clients and we've been promoting the idea of designing for images being turned off for the last couple of years.

So why are we even bothering announcing this? Because some people need to hear things 10 times before they sink in. We still see the occasional customer sending largely image based designs for their clients. We point them to our makeovers and reports, but some still don't seem to get the point.

Consider this another tap on the shoulder about image blocking.

On top of getting your design right, make sure you check out our other tips for minimizing the negatives of image blocking, such as becoming a "safe sender".

5 Comments

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  1. Ben Duncan
    June 1, 2007 2:29pm

    Have CM considered to embed images in outgoing messages as a MIME attachment?

    You can use the ‘Content-CID’ header, no images are required to be loaded via an external URL, they are contained within the MIME message, and within the HTML referenced.

    I know Outlook supports this as standard, other Webmail clients too. You can display images in a message without having to load a URI - I’m sure if CM implemented this, a lot of customers could send messages and not care if external images are blocked.

    We develop a Webmail client and support CID images embeded also.

    I’ve used a Perl module that can load a HTML page, extract images, and create a MIME message with CID attachments. Works like a charm.

    http://search.cpan.org/~alian/MIME-Lite-HTML-1.22/HTML.pm

  2. Dave Greiner
    June 1, 2007 4:19pm

    Hey Ben, thanks for chiming in. From memory, I was under the impression that embedded images weren’t supported by some web-based email clients, but I can’t rememeber which ones exactly. We’ll run a few tests at our end to test support across all of the popular email clients and post an update here.

  3. Dave Greiner
    June 18, 2007 8:27pm

    Ben, finally got around to doing some embedded image testing. Turns out embedded images are still blocked by default in most of the major web-based email clients, including Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. Just like externally referenced images, they display by default if you’re considered a safe sender by that recipient.

    This, combined with the fact that embedding an image sees a big jump in the file size of the email means it’s something we won’t look much further into.

    It would also be interesting to see what kind of impact image embedding has in regards to spam filters too. Anyone out there had any experiences with this?

  4. Bret
    June 7, 2008 6:14am

    Dave--

    This isn’t the case any longer.
    At least not with Gmail. (Try composing a message using Apple Mail’s Stationery.  I have let to find a client that won’t display the message.)

    Might you investigate further?

  5. Charles
    September 29, 2008 1:47pm

    Is it possible to turn off image blocking in Hotmail?

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