208689 - HTTP linked images corrupted when sending mail

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 176416

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Robert B. Denny]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529

If I set the location of an image in Mailnews/MiniComposer to be a URL on a web
server (http://...), it previews fine and looks OK in the Templates folder. But
once I re-edit it for a real message and send it, the link gets changes to one
of those cid: things to a non-existent multipart where the image would go if it
were embedded. Can I not use URL locations for images and have the URL preserfed
on sending. I really DO want it to load from the server, not get embedded (which
doesn't work anyway).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Robert B. Denny]

Oh, this is on 1.4 -- I *think* it worked right on 1.2...

Comment 2

[Daniel Wang]

remote image being converted to attachment is bug 176416

I could see the attachment with 2003060409 build. Reporter, are you in the right
view mode (view | message body as | original HTML) ?

Comment 3

[Robert B. Denny]

Yes I has view/original HTML. 

But now I think I see what's going on... I made a template with 1.2 and then
sent it UNEDITED with 1.4. Apparenyly somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 it became
impossible to send email messages containing <img src="http://x.y.z/foo.jpg">.
The template had one of these, and when it was sent, it got munged into a cid:
reference like it was embedded, the content-type was changed to
multipart/related, but the image itself was not embedded. At least that's as
close as I can get to an explanation. I don't want to reinstall 1.2 for a test :-)

Suggestion: If the Image Location is given as a URL, it should be left that way
(and in a future build, maybe make embedding optional).

I understand why images referenced off the sender's disk need to be embedded,
but not why images that are available via HTTP need to be embedded. In 1.2 I was
able to avoid multipart/related and bloat by referring to the images via HTTP,
resulting in text/html content-type. My tests indicate that most people read
online anyway, so the cost to me is a small increase in web server traffic and
their email downloads faster. 

Oh... I am not a spammer, I develop observatory control software and the
messages are for astronomers.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 176416 ***