Bart

wrote on August 28, 2008 7:21 PM

I've done a little test too with a different (but better) outcome. I've sent a mail from Outlook 2007 using a template with our company footer which contains our logo in GIF format. I've sent this mail to Gmail and Windows Live (the former Hotmail). In Gmail the image appears successfully and the option to hide/show images is not even displayed. In Windows Live the image appears as a gray square, but after I click "mark as safe" the image appears successfully. If I check the full headers of the mail I clearly see that base64 encoding has been used.

Why does my test have a different outcome? Is my test setup different?

Arjen van Reeven

wrote on August 28, 2008 7:41 PM

Thank you for testing this. The method I pointed out in the comments of the previous post was similar but not quite the same thing.

In the HTML, instead of having the IMG tag refer to a "cid:" URI point it to the actual URL of the image hosted on a server. Then append an image part to the email that includes a Content-Location header pointing to the same URL:

--multipart_related_boundary
Content-Type: image/png
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Location: http://example.com/images/logo.png

(image data goes here)
--multipart_related_boundary

At least in Gmail these images are shown immediately, without clicking 'display images'. Even better, they do not show up as attachments.

I would be curious to know how well this method of image inclusion works in other mail clients.

Jamie Learmonth

wrote on August 29, 2008 7:14 PM

Matthew,

We have been using this method for years, and I am not sure what we are doing differently to you, but Yahoo Mail (New version) and Gmail have no problem displaying the images without us even having to click Display images.

We have however recently had a problem with the new Mac Mail having to click 'Display Images'. Also, we of course lose the ability to track opens unless someone clicks on a link.

Jamie

Mathew Patterson

wrote on August 30, 2008 8:08 AM

Hey Jamie, if you want to contact support here at Campaign Monitor we can take a look at a typical example you use and test that too.

Anna

wrote on September 27, 2008 4:12 AM

If you guys have time I would really like to see the same test done using an embedded video file rather than an image. I was only able to test on a handful of email clients...

I'm not endorsing this over using a screenshot, I would just like to know how well its supported.

Thanks!

Dave Greiner

wrote on September 28, 2008 8:27 AM

Good call Anna, that's definitely worth looking into. We'll give it a shot when we get some spare time.

Atrum Amicus

wrote on October 10, 2008 12:21 AM

I am really struggling to bring this comcept together with a PHP HTML generated email I am making. Essentially I want to embed my images into the email I send, but I have little experience in both PHP and MIME. This is the code I have thus far.

EMAIL:
function SendCallMail($to,$Subject,$Html)
{
$to =$to;
$subject = $Subject;
$random_hash = md5(date('r', time()));
$headers = "From: s@d.co.za";
$headers .= "\r\nContent-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=\"PHP-alt-".$random_hash."\"";
ob_start(); //Turn on output buffering
?>

--PHP-alt-
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello World!!!
This is simple text email message.

--PHP-alt-
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

--PHP-alt---

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