Blue box with question mark instead of pictures

Hi,

I'm having trouble seeing images in emails that are sent to me, they appear as a small blue box with a question mark in it, I'm new to mac, so I don't know much about formats and such. I tried sending one from mail to my hotmail and used Safari to open it, the picture was fine, then I forwarded it to my gmail account on Mac's Mail, and it was also fine. So why can I see some and not others?

Another issue is the time it takes to send an email, it takes about 1-3 minutes to send an email, even though it's less than 1MB in size, is this normal? My hotmail sends them quite quickly.

Thanks

Message was edited by: ijanawra