[P1] Pictures in mail program

[Ruffin Bailey]

> Can anyone tell me why I sometimes receive messages with the 
> photographs or pictures just blank grey boxes, and then at the very end 
> of the email all of the pictures appear together?  Maybe this isn't an 
> iBook problem, rather to do with the mail program?  I just don't know. 

It is a "mail program problem", not an iBook problem, per se.  You might try Eudora (free in Sponsored mode) or Thunderbird (Mozilla's new beta browser) and see what you get.

Mail apps can handle images in two ways -- inline using html mail or as attachments.  Now even inline html points to images that are actually attachments, and the format for pointing to those attachments isn't standard html.  Or, sometimes, the image tags are in standard html but point to somewhere online, so you'll see them if you're connected to the Net, but not if you'd downloaded to look at them offline later (this, obviously, isn't what's happening to you right now).

So we've got a few potential culprits for the behavior you've seen, but they basically boil down to the person sending the email might be using inline html image tags that aren't in a format Mail.app (or whatever email client you use) likes.  You could blame your app or their app, but your best bet if it's a constant problem is to check out other mail handlers and see if they do any better.

If you're using OS X on your iBook, this run-down of email clients at Macworld isn't a horrible start:
http://www.macworld.com/2002/10/features/email/

Anyhow, that's my guess. The email utility I've written doesn't do attachments just yet (really shouldn't be sending attachments/images to email lists), but that's what I recall happening with html email when I studied up a while back.  In any event, there's nothing wrong with your iBook!

Good luck,

Ruffin Bailey

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