How to generate an email with inline pics?

Update:

Following David’s suggestion I have found a pretty good solution, by getting ACDSEE (has to be a late version) to export selected images, resized, to a directory on the hard drive which happens to be a Dropbox one. The URL to this is then emailed to the recipient.

Of course the recipient doesn’t “have” the pics as he would with an email, though with an extra step he can download a zipfile of the whole folder.

It’s a better solution for viewing full screen on a PC, where the 1600 pixel wide images would, if placed inline in an email, produce a very wide and unwieldy email.

There is a subtle advantage in that if you create two directories containing different pics and intended for different people, any pics which exist in both directories are uploaded only once. And each person cannot discover the other one (in theory). In practice I would not use Dropbox for anything really sensitive…

I’ve done more tests…

It turns out that Outlook and Outlook Express are both capable of generating inline images in emails, if the emails are inserted using the Insert menu feature.

The program also has to be configured to send emails in HTML, not plain text – predictably!

If you drag/drop them, they are sent as attachments and this also seems to be the case if you invoke Outlook in a command line, as would be the case from ACDSEE.

As I said before, I am just amazed this has not been done before, as a standalone windows executable. All the search hits I am getting are related to bulk emailing (possibly spammer) requirements (where inline images seem to be sough after to avoid the email being classified as spam!) and you could do that perfectly well with a windows executable driven from a mailmerge setup of some kind (e.g. MS Word). It seems to be a road many have gone up…

It also turns out that the email content is passed to Outlook Express via a .eml temporary file, as described here and a way to generate the file is described in many places e.g. here So if you format the .eml file correctly, Outlook Express is just used as a dumb SMTP SEND program.

Yeah, I forgot to add this needs to work on a Psion Organiser

You might all laugh, but one of my most lucrative products, still selling, is old enough to mention the above as one of the configuration tools in its user manual. Just shows that perception and reality are often misaligned if you like your income stream to not be a flash in the pan…

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.

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