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MIME support for inline images #email

πŸ•₯︎ - 2019-06-16

I was about to send an image inline in an email using the venerable MIME standard, when I remembered that many clients don't handle that very well.

So I created a test email to see how they do.

The email is very simple - some text, an inline image, and some more text. Here is a copy, if you want to test your favourite client.

My email client shows it like this:

Gnus displaying my test email

Here are the results:

Client Shows image inline Shows text after image Screenshot
Gmail ❌ at bottomβœ“ image
Office 365 Outlook ❌ at top❌ hidden as attachment image
Outlook iPhone βœ“βŒ hidden as attachment image
Protonmail ❌ as attachment at bottomβœ“ image
Tutanota ❌ as attachment at top❌ hidden as attachment image
K9 Android ❌ as attachment at bottomβœ“ image
Gnus βœ“βœ“ image
Thunderbird βœ“βœ“ image

So what I remembered was not wrong. Most email clients suck at MIME.

The Outlook app on the iPhone gets an extra half mark subtracted for showing an exceedingly ridiculous amount of vertical white space.

Which is not surprising, the relevant RFC is from 1996.

πŸ•₯︎ - 2019-06-16 - 0 comments

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