iOS Mail, email attachments

Hello RKW9,

Thanks for posting! We see you have a question about changes in the Mail app in iOS 14, and we're glad to share some information.

We tested this out and it is normal that images will appear as embedded in email in iOS 14. If you'd like, you can always send your suggestion to Apple directly by using this link: Product Feedback

Take care.

They are attached, RKW9, whether any given email client displays (renders) them inline (called by some as “embedded”) or as some attachment list, or whatever.

Now, of course, you could make a request that you may choose to have the default formatting of your authored emails be plain-text, rather than rich-text (which uses HTML for email formatting, just like webpages).

In both cases, the files (images, photos, whatever) are included as attachments to the email: this is a very old part of the email Internet standards.

Are you, by chance, sending emails, by way of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), to a Microsoft Exchange email server, to be viewed using a Microsoft Outlook email client?

Are you, by chance, further trying to bulk-save the attached images, photos, whatever, using Outlook, and finding that Outlook prevents such bulk-save operations when Outlook happens to render (display) the attachments inline with the email text?

If this is the case, then your issue is with Microsoft, not Apple.

Yes. There was some change in either the default formatting of emails authored in Apple Mail, or some update in the SMTP standard that Apple implemented, or both; and whatever change occurred, it triggered this issue in Microsoft’s software (perhaps because they are not up-to-date in their implementation of the Internet protocols—it is, unfortunately, quite usual for Microsoft to lag in such matters).

While Apple may well provide a mechanism for you to change the default format for authored email, I would not expect Apple to back-out of an update to be in better compliance with newer Internet standards.

However, there is no guarantee that changing the authored email format to plain-text will actually solve your issue with Microsoft Outlook.

(Incidentally, the very old plain-text email format was going the way of the “Dodo” even back in the ‘90s, let alone the twenty-first century.)

Please, RKW9. Don’t confuse appearance with actuality/reality/functionality.

While all email clients (GMail, Apple Mail, even email clients through a web-browser) will render (display) a rich-text email with images, files, and text inline—just like webpages, since HTML is used in formatting both—because that is what the Internet email standard says they should do; only a tiny subset of email clients (with Microsoft Outlook being the only known case, so far) disallow you, the user, from performing bulk attachment operations (such as bulk-saves) merely because of the way said email client chooses to render (display) a received email!

It’s not the appearance that matters.

Ultimately, it’s the functionality that matters.

The interesting thing is that if one avoids using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to transfer an email directly from Apple Mail to a Microsoft Exchange server, but relays the email through just about any other email server (such as GMail, for instance), the final result on the Microsoft Outlook client seems to be sufficiently modified, to the point that Outlook will actually allow bulk attachment operations (such as bulk-saves).

Odd, but true.

We have carefully analyzed all available cases—where the end result works vs. when the end result does not work—and found that one needs both a direct SMTP transfer from Apple Mail to a Microsoft Exchange server, and using Microsoft Outlook to deal with the received email, in order to have the problem of being disallowed bulk attachment operations (such as bulk-saves) on attached photos.

Disrupt either of these conditions, and one can perform bulk attachment operations (such as bulk-saves) on attached photos.

The guaranteed solution, unfortunately, requires Microsoft to stop having Outlook disallow you, the user, from performing bulk attachment operations (such as bulk-saves) merely because of the way Outlook chooses to render (display) a received email!

The trouble is that that will never happen so long as y’all don’t bring the issue up to Microsoft!

(The SMTP connection, between Apple Mail vs. Microsoft Exchange, suggests, but doesn’t prove, that Apple has implemented a more recent version of the SMTP Internet standard. It is likely that as other email clients do likewise—at least so long as Microsoft continues its usual “dragging its feet” on standards—that other email clients will increasingly see similar issues.)