This subject has proliferated over the years, but the answers appear to change with each upgrade of the OS system. I'm using Catalina 10.5.5. Each time I add a pdf or jpg file to an email, it will not appear as an icon. One can right-click the image and change it to an icon, but when mailed it appears as the image, not the icon. Has this bug ever been fixed?
Gordon
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15
A most erudite response! I feel honored that you devoted much of your time to outlining the history for me. I am very appreciative. Since I am a convert to the Mac after many years on the Windows bench, the insights are most illustrative. I do not plan on returning to the other side. Alas, I will have to put aside my logical considerations for organizing prose, which most folks could probably do without, regardless. Again, my thanks for your time and patience!
A most erudite response! I feel honored that you devoted much of your time to outlining the history for me. I am very appreciative. Since I am a convert to the Mac after many years on the Windows bench, the insights are most illustrative. I do not plan on returning to the other side. Alas, I will have to put aside my logical considerations for organizing prose, which most folks could probably do without, regardless. Again, my thanks for your time and patience!
Colonel_Biggs wrote:
This subject has proliferated over the years, but the answers appear to change with each upgrade of the OS system.
The answer has never changed.
I'm using Catalina 10.5.5. Each time I add a pdf or jpg file to an email, it will not appear as an icon. One can right-click the image and change it to an icon, but when mailed it appears as the image, not the icon. Has this bug ever been fixed?
It's not a bug and has never changed. E-mail attachments are attachments. They can never be anything other than attachments. There is a "content-disposition" field that can be either "inline" or "attachment" but it is nothing more than a suggestion. The receiving client can the display the attachment any way it wants.
This is how it has worked for 23 years.
Thanks for your timely response. From reading the history of past responses over the years, I have gathered that not many are satisfied with the situation. But, the "content-disposition" field - where might it be located? Is it applied on an email by email basis, or as an overall selection?
It is part of the MIME email format. If you view an email message as “raw text” you will be able to see these internal codes.
Another thing to keep in mind is that those email standards so many years ago were theoretical. Only a few companies, one of them being Apple, ever bothered to implement them. Others, such as Microsoft and Netscape, came up with new, de-facto standards. Since they controlled the market back then, their interpretation ruled. Although these de-facto standards are still based on MIME, they greatly restricted what could be done with e-mail.
So here is “beleaguered Apple”, circa 2000, struggling to find a CEO and make it through the next fiscal quarter. They have a nice e-mail client. But if they let people pick and choose how attachments are going to be displayed, their e-mails are always going to be wrong on Outlook, and wrong in different ways depending on the version of Outlook that the recipient uses. Back then, it was trivially easy to compose an e-mail message, using Outlook, that Outlook couldn’t properly interpret. Back then, it was much the same with Microsoft as it is with Apple today. It was Microsoft that decided how email worked. So Apple found that hard-coding “inline” was most reliable, even if it annoyed some people.
Sending attachments in Mail as icons only
