Images in email are a common carrier the malware. Reasonable users explicitly 
disable automatic downloading of images in clients that offer that option.

Sent from my test iPhone

> On Oct 2, 2018, at 20:30, Greg Troxel <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Enrico B <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>> This is a big problem because of so many messages with referenced but non 
>> included images.
>> 
>> And because so many messages and information are right in the images.
> 
> That is a problem.  But, it's a matter of opinion if it's a problem with
> the client or with the sender.  Arguably, if the message can't be read
> without the images, it's a violation of accessibility considerations.
> So I side with those that say the problem is the incoming messages, not
> the client.
> 
>> It means you can read your inbox messages just in case you are online.
> 
> That seems like an overly strong characterization of the situation.  I
> read mail with k-9, configured not to fetch images, and with gnus
> (emacs), configured to show me the text/plain alternative.  This works
> fine in most cases.  In cases where it doesn't, I consider the message
> defective.
> 
> As an example, I recently got a library newsletter that had text
> descriptions of upcoming talks.  There was a referenced image, but the
> html had an ALT tag that said "picture of red leaf with shallow depth of
> field".  That's good practice to make the message useful for
> visually-impaired readers, and it worked for me reading the message
> without the image.
> 
> 
> One could argue that if the sender intended the image contentto reach
> the receiver for offline viewing, then it would have been included in
> the message.  It's really an artifact of the html encoding of mail that
> referenced images are even allowed, and with the benefit of hindsight
> I'd say it was a protocol design error.  Mail was sent over non-IP
> transports and the notion that the receiver's MUA in all cases can fetch
> things from the global internet is unsound.
> 
>> What's more, images are not fetched even in case you had already previously 
>> open and read the message when you were online.
> 
> That would be a reasonable optional feature (but would need cache size
> management and settings, so might be too complicated for the benefit).
> 
>> How is it possible that this app has such a limitation?
> 
> It seems obvious that it is not only possible but likely that various
> programs will not do a large number of random things that you wish they
> would do.   How is it possible that you do not understand this :-) ?
> 
>> Is it an usual limitation for most Android email clients?
> 
> My impression is that it is how almost all mail clients behave.  I am
> not aware of any that pre-fetch and cache images that are referenced but
> not included.
> 
> Thunderbird does not seem to do this (and tells people that enabling
> remote content by default is a bad idea):
>  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remote-content-in-messages
> 
> Can you point to another open-source mail user agent that prefetches and
> caches referenced images?
> 
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