Images in Email Signatures

I have a client that likes to use their logo in their email signature. The little graphic, for some reason, triggers the “attachment” indicator in most email clients (GMail and Mail.app, at least).

The graphic is hosted on the web, not really attached to the email. So why is it triggering email clients attachment indicator? Most other HTML emails with images don’t….


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7 responses to “Images in Email Signatures”

  1. Daniel says:

    Chris…forgive me if i’m totally wrong, because i don’t use gmail’s web interface much. But isn’t the star the way of “favouriting” certain emails so you can sort through important ones later? Not an indicator of an attachment?

  2. Chris Coyier says:

    Yes, that’s true, I just happen to have a special rule set up that automatically stars emails with attachments. Should have mentioned that =)

  3. Ian says:

    Are you certain that there isn’t also another image that is attached? Another part of my company still uses Lotus Notes and all of their emails show up with attachments… Each one is a uniquely named gif. Makes no sense.

  4. James says:

    I think it’s because Apple’s email is pure HTML, whereas your clients email is probably RTF formatted (just rich text)… They probably just dropped the logo in using Outlook I suppose. The only way round it AFAIK would be to have an HTML email template into which they have to type all their emails.

  5. Fabian says:

    Maybe.. it has to do with setting is as an image () or as a background image.
    Maybe Apple uses inline css to give a div or h1 a background.
    Good luck finding it out!
    (ps. i saw your tweet on twitter ;) )

  6. Paul says:

    Remember that inline attachments are not shown in the list of attachments since they are only attached for being embeddable in the e-mail itself.
    If you are interested: On GMail, click on “Show original” (hidden in the menu in the upper right hand corner). Look out for “Content-Disposition: inline” – that tells you something is attached.

  7. diziseyret says:

    very good \o/

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