After macOS Monterey 12.0.1 update my mail messages do not display any images

jodywoodcock's answer above is correct. Uncheck protect mail activity under privacy. You can keep hide IP checked. Close mail and restart or shut down and restart your computer.

That worked - I unchecked "Hide IP address" and my emails are back to normal. Thank you veinzen!

I'm posting an retraction to my own question here; something my mother used to always tell me; Patience is a virtue. I had waited for new messages to be received, after enabling "Protect Mail Activity," before posting the above. But I didn't wait long enough. I subsequently went to a late lunch, came back, checked some messages that had been received during the interval, and voilà! The images are there. It does work in the nifty way that was described, and I'm happy to discover that. Thanks.

Keep in mind that if you uncheck the box "Protect Mail Activity" OR you click the box "Load Content Directly" the sender of the email will get your IP address, so if you plan to view remote content, then you might as well uncheck the box. This also tells the sender that you read the message. This is an excellent way for spammers to verify your address. So checking the box "Protect Mail Activity" and only clicking on "Load Content Directly" for messages that are not spam is the safest option to protect your privacy and reduce spam, unfortunately.

I had to uncheck hide my IP address, as well as the other changes to privacy suggested in the reply. I am not happy about not hiding my IP address but this way the content does load directly without having to click on that button before seeing the graphics.

Found out my issue. There is a known conflict with Kaspersky which I have. https://support.kaspersky.co.uk/common/macos/15825

You need to go into mail preferences and change Privacy settings. Restart mail and the content will show up again.

I had to also uncheck Hide IP Address to get this back to its previous state where I dont have to click Load Content Directly on every mail message

Re jodywoodcock, having Hide IP address checked by itself also prevents remote content to download. You need to uncheck all boxes.

FYI - You do have to untick Hide IP address in order to allow automatic loading of remote content.

I guess I have to disagree with you. I have it set to protect on my system. A lot of email I get I don't care to see the images. So if its one I do then I click it.

When you have it clicked it is protecting you. If you unclick that then you have removed the protection. You will probably have to use a VPN to get the images and still protect your privacy.

You may already know this part but in case you don't. The trackers insert a single pixel in the image that comes from a different server. If you have images loading then everytime that pixel is downloaded the sending server knows what IP address it is sent to. Then they can compare that address to other collected data to know who you are and what you are then looking at.

The only other way would be to not go to any website that imbeds the tracking pixel image. Not a good choice.

You might look at Apple Private Relay as the alternative. You can research that.

khungui,

I think you are correct. I am running Avast Business Antivirus, per my IT department instructions. I went into the webshield settings and added the imap name of Apple's me.com site for email.

I restarted the systems, and it now seems to allow me to see my attached mail files on the Apple Mail program.

It is weird that MS Outlook could read my Apple Mail documents all along this process. Only the Apple Mail program was affected in the downloading of attached files from my me.com mail. I am not sure why Avast affected Apple Mail and not MS Outlook for the reading of my mail files from the Apple site.

Thanks for the post!

Turn on firewall (feature works as expected).

Based on what I heard about this feature, the entire purpose of the feature is to load the images while still protecting your privacy, so that you don't have to make a choice between having your email look like garbage or giving up on privacy. Given that it said my network preferences were not allowing the feature to work, I opened System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Firewall (tab) and then clicked button to "Turn On Firewall". Since I don't recall ever changing this setting I was surprised it was off. Anyway, with Firewall turned on I was able to get images in email without turning off Protect Mail Activity. This is clearly what Apple intended. Hope that helps.

Found out that the only solution is to also uncheck "Hide IP address".

Bingo!

And yes, in my case, "Hide IP" was the problem.