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How to embed images in HTML email on the mail server?

Answer 1

A:

It can't be done, but that's OK because modern browsers use a KeepAlive feature so that the connection to the server is retained for image loading.

2009-02-08 06:26:09

Note: The OP is asking about HTML formatted EMail, not web pages.

Eddie 2009-02-08 06:32:49

Answer 2

+2 A:

I don't think the W3C HTML specs really allow you to do this.

But if you really want to, you could create a pixel-width by pixel-height table, and set the cell background colors one by one to create your image.

Jack Leow 2009-02-08 06:26:53

and you REALLY want to recieve emails like this? :)

kender 2009-02-08 06:37:19

++! i want the same thing you are smoking ;)

miceuz 2009-02-08 07:10:37

Oh come on, you can't say I wasn't being creative. :)

Jack Leow 2009-02-08 12:30:25

Answer 3

+8 A:

What you need to do is encode the file to Base64, and include it like this:

<img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhUAA..(the rest of your base64 encoded file)..">

http://www.hedgerwow.com/360/dhtml/base64-image/demp.php

http://www.sweeting.org/mark/blog/2005/07/12/base64-encoded-images-embedded-in-html

http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2005/06/base64-ie/

nickf 2009-02-08 06:27:14

data urls dont work on IE.

mP 2009-02-08 06:35:18

Does this work for emails?

Luca Matteis 2009-02-08 06:36:38

the links explain how to make it work in IE. most email programs these days use the same rendering engine as one of the browsers, or indeed are in the browser, so it should work for most people.

nickf 2009-02-08 06:39:06

Not really actually, HTML in emails is very much restricted compared to the one rendered in browsers.

Luca Matteis 2009-02-08 06:42:36

And Outlook uses MS Word not MS IE.

David Dorward 2010-07-22 15:47:49

Answer 4

A:

Here's a handy Image to HTML converter - warning creates NASTY HTML! :)

Marc Novakowski 2009-02-08 06:32:16

ha from the author : "it's big, bloated and slow. What use is this?In its pure form, none. At least none that I can think of."

Simon_Weaver 2009-11-18 10:08:37

Answer 5

+1 A:

The question that comes to my mind is - why you don't want a normal <img> tag in your html?

Attaching a image to the body of html might sound tempting, but it will definetly slow down the email downloading times, and some people use stuff like gprs connection so they want to limit their bandwidth.

IMO having images inside your html is pure evil. But that's just out of curiosity, to ask why you want such a solution - seems @nickf alredy gave you a good one :)

kender 2009-02-08 06:44:24

Email downloading is usually a background task and users are normally only notified once the mail is downloaded. I think it is better to embed images than have it download when the mail is opened. As to why? Often links to images are blocked by firewalls or not available in offline mode.

mxc 2009-02-08 09:36:37

Then the @Kobi's solution seems pefect - send images as attachments and link to attachments in the email body. This way you still allow users to get the light-weight body-only

kender 2009-02-08 11:41:52

I, as user of such an email client, would prefer to have a setting where I could tell the programm to either prefetch or not, depending on my trust in the sender (or spam filter or whatnot) Most important, for me, would be the "no images anytime" radio box... It's my computer, not the sender's.

lexu 2009-02-08 12:47:38

Hi Lexu, I will leave that up to the developers of the mail client to implement. My concern is to have the image delivered with the mail. Most people like to receive html mail so being able to improve their expereince is important.

mxc 2009-02-14 06:30:58

Answer 6

+4 A:

The standard solution for that is to add the image as an attachment. Every attachment has a ContentID, so you can embed the image using: <img src="cid:ContentID" />.
This will embed the image in the email, not in the html.

Kobi 2009-02-08 07:13:00

thanks will give it a try. Emails is mainly what I am looking at

mxc 2009-02-14 06:27:59

Answer 7

A:

I reevaluated solutions for this recently.

According to this blog the support for inline attachments has been improved, new stuff was pushed to the mainline Rails repo.

I didn't check which Rails version is lucky enough to contain this change, though.

For my 2.3.x deployments I used the inline_attachment gem.

Wojciech Kaczmarek 2010-07-22 15:43:08

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How to embed images in HTML email on the mail server?

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