Embedded not Attachments - infuriating!

You will probably find this answer infuriating, but it's true: There is nothing you can do to guarantee how the client email application (formally known as a mail user agent or MUA) will handle multipart messages; IOW, ones with any kind of attachment besides plain text ones.

The problem is not in anything Mail.app or OS X does but in the accepted industry standards for handling multipart messages. It's called MIME & it intentionally does not specify how the MUA should display attachments. The best you can do is make sure the MIME Content-Disposition is set to "attachment" rather than "inline" if you do not want it to appear as if it was embedded (inline) with the text content of the message, but there is nothing you can do about it if the receiving MUA is programmed to ignore the Content-Disposition header (& many are not).

Either way, it's exactly the same attached file. The difference is the user and mail client on the other end. Some clients will display attached images inline, others will display them as attachments, and many allow the user to choose which way to do things. You cannot control that.

Also, note that because it's attached to the e-mail either way, images displayed inline should be capable of being saved to the hard drive. Howeer, many users do not understand how to do that. If you know of a specific mail client that does not allow saving of inline images, that mail client is... well, I'll keep the language clean here and say "bad," though that does not express the full depth of disgust I would feel for such a program. 😉

Yup, I pretty well figured you were having trouble with recipients using Outlook, which is (IMHO) the worst piece of #*%&*#&% ever foisted off on customers by Microsoft... and, unfortunately, many of them eat it right up, because they don't know any better! The fact that it doesn't let you simply save embedded images as-is is worthy of much ridicule.

Here's one possible solution:

http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/saveembeddedpictures.htm

Also, there is evidently a Save As Picture option in Outlook 2010, though that does not sound as if it saves the original attached image.

A couple of things you can try that might trick Outlook into not messing up your message: Choose Edit > Attachments > Insert Attachments at End of Message. Also, make your message plain text.

It's easy. The problem is when you copy and paste for your email signature instead of typing in your email signature. It has something to do with HTML??? When I removed the copy and pasted portion of my email signature, presto! All of the pictures I sent from my phone started coming over as jpeg attachments instead of being imbedded in the email.