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When I forward some e-mails to my friends, they receive only text and not pictures with the text. How do I fix this?

This can happen due to several different settings, both on your own computer as well as on the computers of your recipients. Let’s start by looking at your outgoing message settings and then we’ll look at the settings your recipients may need to tweak.

Outgoing E-mail Settings

When you send an e-mail, your e-mail program will send the message in HTML or plain text format. HTML, Hyper Text Markup Language, is the language commonly used for Web pages. When your e-mails are sent in HTML format, fonts, stationary, smiley faces, images, and other settings are sent. In other words, your e-mail messages look “pretty.” When your e-mails are sent in plain text format, all of the pretty formatting is discarded. Your recipients will see plain old text and any embedded images will disappear.

Check to see if your e-mail client is sending messages in HTML or plain text. If it’s sending plain text, change this setting to HTML. The steps vary from one e-mail client to the next. Using Windows Live Mail as an example, you would to Tools > Options and click on the Send tab. Under Mail Sending Format, click HTML.

Another possibility involves the “send pictures with e-mail” setting in Windows Live Mail. When forwarding an e-mail with embedded pictures, click on the Format menu from within the message that you are composing and make sure that “Rich Text (HTML)” and “Send pictures with message” are both selected.

Incoming E-mail Messages

Even if you are doing your part and sending the e-mail messages properly, it’s still possible that your friends will not receive the images. Several possibilities include:

• File size restrictions imposed by Internet Service Providers
• Plain text setting for incoming messages
• Computer security software blocking images

ISPs often block large messages and photos are notoriously large. However, since your friends are receiving text, this doesn’t appear to be the case.

Just as your outgoing settings could have been set to send messages in HTML or plain text, so too can your friends’ e-mail settings be set to read messages in plain text. As an example, in Windows Live Mail, your friends would need to go to Tools> Options and click on the Read tab. Under Reading Messages, they would need to remove the check mark next to “Read all messages in plain text.

Finally, computer security programs often block suspicious images. Spammers use embedded images to gauge whether or not a user has opened the spam e-mail message. Since the images are linked to a remote server, the spammer can verify if you opened the e-mail by looking at server logs. By blocking the images, the server is never contacted and the spammer can’t verify if you opened the e-mail or not. Usually, there’s a link that says, “unblock images” when this occurs. Your friends may also be able to adjust these settings. In Windows Live Mail, these settings are found in Tools > Safety Options. Your friends should add you to their Safe Senders list and then click on the Security tab. From there, they should place a check mark in the option that says, “Show images and internal content sent from e-mail addresses in my Safe Senders list.”

Graphics do not show in my email.

There are many reasons why emails that contain images show up either with a big red X where the image should be or a string of text instead of the picture. Usually, this has to do with the settings on your computer and the way the images are being sent in the email.

HTML in an email may not actually contain an image - it may contain a reference to an image that is downloaded separately. Microsoft Outlook 3 in particular, is known for causing problems with default settings for images. There are some fairly easy things you can do to try to fix the problem.

Check Settings

The easiest things to check are the settings in both Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. First, go to Internet Explorer. Open Tools and then Internet Options. Choose Advanced and find Multimedia. Make sure the item “Show Pictures” is checked.

Once you’ve done that, go to Outlook Express and click on Tools. Choose Options and then go to Security. Find “Virus Protection”. If the option “Do not allow attachments” is checked, clear it and then chose Apply.

Firewall

It’s possible that you have too much security in the form of firewalls on your computer. Windows comes with an installed firewall, but when it is coupled with third-party security that also has firewall protection, you can run into trouble. Try disabling the Windows firewall and see if that solves your image problem. To do this, go to Start and then Control Panel. Find Windows Firewall and click on the General tab. You can turn it off with one click. This is safe as long as you have another security system in place that has it’s own firewall.

Registry Fix

You can also try to fix the problem in the registry. Close Outlook and navigate to the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTempFolder . You can then see the folder in this key - it will probably be something similar to this: %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKxxxxx\. Delet all of the files you find in the folder and restart Outlook.

Delete Browsing History

Sometimes deleting your browsing history can help with images not showing in emails. Go to Tools and then Internet Options and delete the Browsing History. Go to Start and then Control Panel. Choose Internet Options and then General tab.  Under Browsing History, choose Delete.

Hopefully one of these options will get your images back in your emails - let us know if you need any more help.

My incoming email will not show graphics. Why not?

E-mail Security Features

Believe it or not, this is actually a security feature. I know, it sounds odd. As if pictures of cute puppies could possibly be dangerous! Two main types of threats are associated with e-mail images: malware and Web beacons.

Malware Threats in Photo Attachments

If someone’s computer is infected with a virus or malware, it’s not uncommon for the program to spread by embedding itself in a file. When this file is shared with other users, the malware is shared too. While the images that your family members and friends send may be harmless, you can’t be 100 percent sure. A good antivirus/anti-spyware program will catch most of the attachments containing malware, but newer threats may not yet have been secured against.

Web Beacons

The other threat involving graphics in e-mail messages has privacy implications. E-mail marketers often send out e-newsletters, ads, and other messages with graphics and other HTML features. This makes the messages visually appealing. However, graphics have a little secret: they can tell the marketer whether or not you opened the e-mail.

Who cares? You might not care so much if you subscribed to the newsletter or want the coupons that landed in your inbox, but what about if the message was pure spam? You already know better than to respond to spammers as doing so confirms that your e-mail address is valid and thereby makes it more valuable for selling to other spammers, right? Graphics do the same thing. They confirm that your e-mail address goes to a real live person.

Graphics can do this because when you open a message with embedded graphics, a connection is made to the server hosting the graphic. Your computer must communicate with this server in order to display the image. Spammers can then review the server logs to see which recipients’ computers connected. It’s all done with software, so it’s super easy for spammers to verify good e-mail addresses.

Images used in this manner are known as “Web beacons.” To make it even trickier, plain text e-mail messages can also contain invisible Web beacons. The spammer creates a small (usually one pixel by one pixel), white image and hides it somewhere within the message. You don’t see any images but the image is there, quietly telling the spammer that he’s found a good e-mail address.

Because of these concerns, many e-mail clients are set to block images.

Displaying Graphics in E-mails 

If you have a good antivirus/anti-malware program installed on your computer, then you can make a couple of adjustments so that you can receive the graphics that you trust and block those that you do not trust.

The steps vary depending on your email client. Using Windows Live Mail as an example, go to Tools > Safety Options > Security. Now find the section that is labeled “Download Images.” Place a check mark in both options which are:

• Block images and other content in HTML emails
• Show images and external content sent from emails in my Safe Senders list.

Now, go to the Safe Senders tab and enter any contacts that you consider safe. If you click the “Also trust e-mail from my Contacts” option, then messages with images from people in your contact list will come through without blocking.