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How to generate an email with inline pics?

Every method seems to end up sending images as attachments, so the recipient has to click on each one individually. For say 10 pics, this is cumbersome.

I think that if you manually drag/drop multiple pics into an Outlook composition window then they do appear in the email body when received in Outlook, but while I do have Outlook (2003 actually) I don’t use it (a horrible program and historically a massive virus magnet) and my image sending gets done in various ways, with the main method for casual image sending (the Send To menu in Windows Explorer) being Outlook Express. I use a totally different (very basic) email program for all other emails.

However, if you configure an email program (including Outlook) as one of the Send To options in Windows Explorer then you are not manually drag/dropping anymore. The images always get sent as attachments.

So this job needs something which explicitly formats the email and all images as wholly inline which I think involves some special form of MIME encoding. I know maybe 99% of normal people use Outlook for receiving emails so it needs to be at least Outlook (2003) compatible.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter,

no mail program will do this, as it is considered a spammer method and the moment you start doing inline images, you end up on all the black lists faster than you know what happens. Inline images are not officially illegal but for all practical purposes shunned. So attachments is the way to go.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

That is interesting… however most of the universe is using Outlook so this should be a huge problem.

I got Justine to send me a little email from Outlook, and it actually looks like Outlook formats it using HTML to achieve this effect:



then you have the base64-encoded jpeg image and then the email ends with

A lot of the stuff before the image is obviously garbage in so far as you don’t need style sheets for an email (the email prog in win8 and the ones on the Ipad do that too) but to me it looks like HTML. I didn’t know you can have an inline image in HTML…

OTOH I may have this wrong and all I am seeing is the text of the email in both plain and HTML versions, which is pretty standard. The HTML section terminates before the image appears.

Also I have just found that that if you drag/drop they become attachments! You have to use the Insert menu to achieve the inline effect.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

When I use a Chrome browser I can paste images into a Gmail email and the images become embedded.

ESTL

Yes, that’s right. Outlook and Gmail send inline images by sending the mail as multipart-MIME. The image is only displayed in the HTML version of the message. If someone views the plain text version of the mail, they see a tag like “[image: Inline image 1]” in place of the image.

This is bad for accessibility and a whole bunch of other reasons, but unfortunately because Outlook and Gmail support it, many people use it without knowing better :/

N

EGBJ and Firs Farm, United Kingdom

Peter, are you looking for an application that can do this, or do you want to know how to code something to do it? If so, which language?

EGBJ and Firs Farm, United Kingdom

Curiously, I sent Justine back an email, using my crude text-only email program (Forte Agent) containing the exact text of her email, but she doesn’t see the image. She just sees the HTML, the style sheet crap, and the base64-encoded stuff, literally.

So there is something else which an email sending program needs to be doing to achieve this, and which doesn’t appear in the email I receive even if I display it as “raw”.

The specific context I am trying to address is this:

I use ACDSEE (a popular image viewer / slide show prog / image editor / Lightroom-competitor-pretender etc) to send people collections of images.

ACDSEE v5 (10 years old now, but very fast and solid) offers a built-in SMTP send feature, with optional image downsize to say 1024 wide (you don’t want to be emailing 10-20MB images, obviously). That works brill but gets sent as attachments which is a big hassle if you send say 10 pics.

ACDSEE PRO v7 (almost the last version, slower, buggy, bloated, but has good features like DNG support) does the above, plus it offers an alternative option of using an external program to do the actual emailing. So I config that for Outlook Express. Same result as above, however. But the external program mode offers a potential solution.

I don’t know how the downsized images get transferred from ACDSEE PRO v7 to Outlook Express, but presumably via temporary file(s). But whatever method it is, it must be fairly standard.

So I am going to look for an SMTP SEND prog which does inline images…

The other way would be to pick up those temporary files, base64-encode them (in a batch file or whatever) and use Outlook Express to email the result. But that doesn’t seem to work… regardless of whether the result is emailed as an attachment or as body text.

I wonder if the built-in Iphone/Ipad email app displays inline images?

Peter, are you looking for an application that can do this, or do you want to know how to code something to do it? If so, which language?

Just spotted your later post… Yes, but I can’t believe it hasn’t been done already!

This is bad for accessibility and a whole bunch of other reasons

I am sure, but one could make the same point about half the stuff from Microsoft (which is why e.g. at work we never send MS Office documents to customers or suppliers – always print to PDF) and I think all the people I might send pics to have Outlook, or an Iphone/Ipad, or both.

As with most things, many people have been up this path before

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

You might be better off using some third party software for this.

There’s loads of useful information here

Update:

It appears that the ex-Outlook email uses the infamous winmail.dat method to encode the attachment.

When Justine emails herself, and opens it in the ISP’s webmail, the attachment appears as “winmail.dat”.

Of course I have a prog called “winmail reader” for this

However, the exact same email is received by me with a normal .jpg attachment, not one called winmail.dat, so there is more to this…

Thanks for that link, Steve. Interesting:

here -

only HTML email can have embedded tracking images.

I don’t want to track opens but this is pretty clear – HTML has to be used to do inline images.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter, there must be a SymbianOS solution to this problem no?

EGTK Oxford
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