Wow! That's too much trouble for me. Thanks anyway.
Wilton On Feb 13, 2009, at 12:47 AM, Robert MacLeay wrote: > > 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. > > > Wilton Shaw [email protected] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
