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Is it possible to overcome the following: on occasion it is not possible to view pictures contained in inbound e-mail as well as inbound videos with sound where there is no sound.

Incoming E-mail Photos Do Not Display

A couple thoughts come to mind as far as the photos in your e-mail messages not displaying properly. The first has to do with a setting within the e-mail client while the second has to do with the message itself.

E-mail clients like Microsoft Outlook Express and its successor Windows Live Mail have a feature that can block images from displaying. When the e-mail client blocks images, it is doing so to protect your privacy. Marketers that send newsletters via e-mail often use images as markers to let them know whether or not a recipient has opened the message. This is because images are hosted on a server elsewhere. When you open the message, your computer connects to this external server to display the image. The marketers can later look at reports to see which recipients connected to the server. Useful from a marketing perspective but kind of creepy. Plus, it’s not just marketers who can use this type of tracking tool. Spammers can use this information to verify that an e-mail address is valid. If you open a spammed message with images, the spammer will then have proof that they have a live person’s address. From there, they may even sell your address to other spammers.

When image blocking is enabled, you will see a yellow bar across the top of the message that indicates that the images have been blocked. You will also see an “Unblock Images” link. If you trust the sender and don’t mind if they know you’ve viewed the message, then go ahead and unblock the images. If not, don’t.

This setting can be adjusted. In Windows Live Mail, go to Tools > Safety Options > Security and find the section labeled Download Images. Place a checkmark in each of the two options. Similar options exist for different e-mail clients and Web-based mail.

The other possibility, especially if the problem is random, is that the images are being blocked somewhere along the way. For example, your ISP may have some sort of spam filter in place that may be blocking images before they get to you.               

Incoming Videos Do Not Play

As far as videos not displaying when there’s no sound, that’s odd. Can you view the videos at all? But when you do, you can’t hear anything? If you cannot open some videos at all, it’s possible that the e-mail client’s security feature is once again at work. Using Windows Live Mail as an example once again, go to Tools > Safety Accounts > Security. Is “Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus” marked? If so, your e-mail client is blocking the video because it has the potential to contain a virus. If you trust the sender, you can temporarily remove this setting and view the video, but do so with care and make sure your antivirus product is up-to-date.

 em>I have been unsuccessful in attaching 24 photos to e-mail. Is there a limit to the number of attachments per e-mail?

Email Attachments and ISPs

It’s not so much the number of photos as it is the file size of the collection as a whole. Whether you send twenty four 1 MB photos or one 24 MB photo, the end result is the same in the eyes of the ISP - 24 MB of data that needs to go through their server.

Many ISP limit the file size per email as large file sizes require more system resources than small ones. If you are using a free email service, you will likely see a lower limit than if you are using a paid service. Likewise, dialup email accounts tend to have lower limits than their broadband counterparts. After all, trying to send 24 megabytes of data over a telephone line is a completely different experience than sending that same amount over a cable or DSL connection.

Not only do you have your own ISP limits to be concerned with, you also have the ISP of your recipient to consider. You may have a generous limit but if your recipient’s ISP has a lower limit, then your images won’t land in your recipient’s inbox.

Time Limits

In addition to the file size limits, your email application may be set up with too short of a timeout time. For example, if your email application has a timeout limit of one minute before it disconnects and you are trying to send a group of photos that is expected to take five minutes, your application will timeout before the message is successfully sent. The same is true of your recipient. If your recipient’s timeout setting is too short, the application will timeout before the message is fully downloaded.

To change the timeout settings, go to Tools > Accounts and click on your mail account. Click on Properties. Click on the Advanced tab. Under Server Timeouts, adjust the slider bar to a longer setting.

Alternatives to Sending Bulk Photos

If you don’t want to go through the hassles of tweaking your email application, you have other options. You can send a series of email messages, each with a smaller batch of photos or you could use a photo sharing service. With photo sharing services, which are generally free, you upload your photos to a website where you can add captions, create albums, and more. From there, you send a link to your recipient. Your recipient can then click the link, view your photos, download photos, or even order prints.