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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

Macbook Pro 15", Mac OS X (10.6.2)

Posted on Dec 29, 2009 2:29 PM

Reply
18 replies

Dec 31, 2009 12:43 PM in response to babowa

You don't have to apologise, you have been really helpful! Since you said it might be an iPhone issue, I checked to see the exact same photo on my mac, I sent it from my hotmail to my Mail and it worked fine, so its just the iPhone, not sure whether it's just mine or the iPhone in general, I will get someone to send me something. Also another email I had Jpegs in it and didn't show up, it was one of the emails that gmail exported for me when I made the switch from Hotmail, and I went to Hotmail, forwarded the same message, and the pictures turned up fine. Really not sure what's going on!

Mar 16, 2010 9:29 AM in response to Kaaru Ando

I'm having the same problem. Most of the emails are from sources such as retail stores/sites. Up until about a month ago, I was able to view the images. But now, it seems more and more of these emails are producing the blue box. I'm using SL as well. Should I reinstall it? Not sure I feel comfortable doing it and if I recall correctly, I went to the Apple store for some issues a few months ago and they reinstalled it for me but wasn't happy about it. I can't remember specifics but I know I thought that I didn't want to have to do that again if it wasn't absolutely necessary.

Dec 29, 2009 4:54 PM in response to ijanawra

Usually it means that the image/file is in a format your browser or mail plugins cannot read. There are a few Windows proprietary formats you cannot read with a Mac (unless you're running Windows of course); there have also been problems reported with images being sent by an AOL account that would not show, so there could be several reasons. You might want to check with the sender and ask what format the image/file is - readable formats are the popular .pdf and .jpg (among many others). Sometimes there are also problems with PC's sending attachments to a Mac; in Mail, there is an option to check "send Windows friendly attachments" - I bet there is no such option in Windows.... I've had this problem off and on and I attribute it to the fact that I choose to be in the less than 10% world's population with a Mac.

Dec 31, 2009 12:49 PM in response to ijanawra

Its also a symptom of an ISP blocking images but letting the body of the email go onwards. I've seen it on occasion with pictures in email signatures which get passed around and around and eventually they get blocked for some reason.

I'm not sure but it appeared to be the difference between an embedded picture in a RTF/HTML format email and an attachment. Some email systems send them in raw text format so any embedded images get dropped, but attachments are able to continue.

Mar 6, 2010 6:03 AM in response to Graham Outterside

I finally found my problem stated, but I receive the same email on four computers, Snow Leopard on MacBook Pro, Intel Mini Mac, and 10.4.8 on old Mini, and PowerBook. The blue square with the question mark only shows on SL on MacBook Pro but did not show up on Leopard. It also does not show up when I boot from an external disk cloned from the MacBook Pro. So, it's obviously not the email source that is the problem; it has to be something within the OS installed. I am going to try to re-install just Mail and see what happens, because I originally installed the upgrade to Snow Leopard, not the initial install as was in the Intel Mini. If I succeed, I will post it here.

Mar 16, 2010 8:31 PM in response to CiaoCiao

Thanks for telling me about not reinstalling. I did try cloning mail from the external hard disk I had originally cloned from my MacBook Pro because there the blue box question marks didn't appear. The cloned mail not only caused me to lose much of my mail, but the marks now showed up on the cloned mail? Must be something within the computer itself that refuses to allow the gifs or whatever to show. In my case it is mainly on email from Thai Airlines and RBC a daily sending religious email. It can't be the site if my other computers receive it intact. Perhaps the firewall or filter is the source of the problem, but I don't know enough to fool around with that. Hope someone gets the answer because it really bugs me eventhough it's nothing really serious that I am losing out on something.

Apr 7, 2010 1:35 PM in response to ijanawra

Same problem here. I tried all proposed solutions. Repaired permissions. Last update of Leopard. Rebuilt Mail databases. No effect.
MacBook running Snow Leopard. Blue lego question mark with JPG and JPEG file.

As usual, Apple is not responsive and is not fixing a major flaw on something we should be able to use everyday. Welcome to the "de-novative" company.

Blue box with question mark instead of pictures

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