Photos embedded in emails - teach me why some computers don't "see" them?

[pattilondre]

Hi all, I have a food blog, Worth The Whisk. Twice monthly, I send an email update to subscribers of what's new on the blog. I create the emails in HTML and distribute via Your Mailing List Provider (YMLP) website.

SOME computers (including my husband's) won't load the photos. He gets a blank box with tiny red X in top left -- not the same as the "click to download photos."

I grab my photos from my blog via the PROPERTIES URL. Before that, I posted them on Flickr and grabbed that URL, neither work.

I now have a new computer and MY emails don't show the picture, either, yet they do show the banner art, which is also grabbed via my blog.

Can someone tell me what the HTML of an embedded photo should look like, or provide an example of a URL that works?

The HELP folks at YMLP are useless, they just look at my HTML and say, "yes the photo is there." DUH.

LOVE all the support on this wonderful blog, thank you in advance. LOVE YOU ALL, thanks!

Patti
Worth The Whisk Recipes for Home Cooks

[notsotechie]

I've tried it out I feel depends on what email you use
but I found if you right click the photo and paste it in the body of the message
it should work

hope this help

Cheers

[dakwegmo]

Using the image from the first post I see, your code should look like this

<img src="http://worththewhisk.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Saturdaysaladwithpeekingcat_thumb.jpg" title="Saturday-salad-with-peeking-cat" alt="Saturday-salad-with-peeking-cat" border="0" height="404" width="507" />

Since you're using WordPress, you might be able to find a plugin that will let you create the newsletter within WP, and it will handle all of the formatting for you. I know there are a couple commercial ones, but I don't know about free versions.

[wulf]

There is nothing you can do to force it to work. Some email clients (and that includes web-based ones like Googlemail) routinely turn them off by default. To be honest, I rather like that as it makes the messages much quicker to load.

As a fall back position, how about publishing the "pretty" version online somewhere and including a link that points back to it. You might be able to help some people figure out how to get their choice of email client to display the images straightaway but that way you also have a fall back position.

Wulf

[dakwegmo]

If you aren't familiar with email mime types, you should become familiar with them. A lot of people still read their email as plain text, so each email should be constructed as both an HTML and a plain text version. A lot of newsletter programs allow you to create these without much effort. At the very least you should do as Wulf says, and have a URL that recipients can visit to see the HTML version online exactly as you intended.