On Feb 12, 9:18 am, Wilton Shaw <[email protected]> wrote: > Ever so often I get an eMail that contains pictures. Only where the > picture is supposed to be, I see a tiny, tiny icon. How can I open > this icon?
There are two ways in which pictures can get into the email you receive. The first and obvious is that they ride along with the text of the email as attachments. The other is that they are NOT included; instead, the web addresses of the photos are included in the email, and your mail reader fetches them off the internet when you open the message to read it. The "broken" icons are inserted by Mail.app to tell you that it cannot display what it has been told is a picture. They cannot be opened because they are simply placeholders for something that is not there. If you want to troubleshoot a particular email, this is how to go about it: First, you must ask Mail.app to display the source code of the email. You do this by going to the menubar and selecting View > Message > Raw Source. This will open a separate message with a whole lot of raw code in it. This is the true message that was sent to you, and which is usually hidden from delicate eyes. Pictures here are indicated by the code <img src="cid:name of image"... or <img src="http://"web location of image"... (Sometimes additional code will be inserted between "img" and "src=") Now, if it is the former, scrolling down the page will reveal solid blocks of code (tens of thousands of characters without spaces between them) preceded by a 4 or 5 line headers containing something like "Content-id: <name of image>" (Name of Image, of course, will in both cases actually be a string of numbers) These are the actual pictures, one per block. If they are present, assume the pictures became corrupted before you got them; you are totally out of luck. Transferring this code to an imaging program and having it interpreted there is theoretically possible, but I have never succeeded in doing it. Now, if it is the latter (src="http://...), the pictures were not included in the email, and Mail.app is having difficulty downloading the pictures from the internet. This is because either (a) Mail.app tried, but the connections failed, and it gave up, or (b) the URL is incorrect, or (c) Mail.app found the files, but they were corrupted. This you can test. Copy the URL and paste it into your browser. If the problem was (a), you may get through this time and the picture will appear in your browser window. If the problem was (b), you will get the familiar 404-File Not Found error message, or something similar. If the problem was (c), you will either see tens of thousands of meaningless characters appear as plain text, or a broken picture icon, or just a question mark. Now, having said that, I have some bad news for you. Finding the "src=" tags in a 100,000+ character text file is a chore, particularly because Mail.app will not search raw source code. Steve Jobs has disabled the Find function in Mail.app. You will have to copy the entire file into a word processor document such as TextEdit or TextWrangler and conduct your search there. Personally, most of the time I have problems with seeing pictures in email, it is because they are buried in a forwarded message, and my mail reader (I use Entourage, not Mail.app) gets confused with too many layers of forwarding. Searching, copying, and pasting the URLs into Safari works for me. Assuming I'm willing to work that hard to see them. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Low End Mac's iMac List, a group for those using G3, G4, G5, and Intel Core iMacs as well as Apple eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
