Does not display featured image in mail app on iOS 15

I’ve had one other report of Apple’s Mail app not showing images…

The best bet may have to do with Mail’s new Privacy Protection feature. It says, under Learn More, that it routes all remote content (images) through relays, blocking exposure of your IP address… and somehow is breaking when loading the images from your website. Doing it through a relay may trigger firewalls or security filters, not sure.

If you turn off Privacy Protection, then two options show up, Hide IP Address, and Block All Remote Content.

I’ve tested turning it off and both options off as well, but the image doesn’t seem to load still. I can only assume it’s something on the website or hosting/network that is affecting loading from Mail’s user agent or IPs etc, maybe it’s marked as a bot, etc. If possible I would check server and security logs for errors around the time of receiving and/or opening the email.

More info:
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-mail-privacy-protection-iphf084865c7/ios

https://support.apple.com/guide/mail/change-privacy-preferences-mlhlae4a4fe6/15.0/mac/12.0`

I talked today with my hosting provider, nothing is wrong on the hosting side. I talked today with Apple, they say it’s on the MailChimp/Plugin side. All I know is that the featured image in a WordPress post does not display in a MailChimp email campaign on iOS 15 when the RSSITEM:CONTENT tag is used. And it’s a wider issue than this one example. The header image I used in the email campaign, which is remotely loaded, works fine. Specifically what doesn’t load is the featured image. The image will show fine in an email campaign if I use the RSSITEM:IMAGE tag, but I don’t want to manually create a campaign for every post, I automate it with the CONTENT tag. There are quite a few layers to this, I’m just trying to figure out if there is a fix and I know I’m not the only one with the issue. It seems to be either Mailchimp or the plugin that does not work nicely with iOS 15 mail.app

Hi @watchcomplications yes agreed, I’d love to figure out what’s causing this. I do have another Mail image bug report as well, and have received test emails from them. They’ve contacted Apple support regarding this and they have no clue. By turning off Mail Privacy and it still not working, it is a major concern.

I’d recommend using the Bug form in our plugin’s Contact us page to send an email to us directly, so we can troubleshoot this deeper with you directly.

I can’t spot anything in the RSSITEM:CONTENT tag that would cause an obvious issue, here’s their redacted HTML below exactly that also does not load this image, but does load the header image just fine.

<div style="text-align: center;"><br>
<a href="https://redacted123.tld/a-post-slug-redacted-here/" title="A post title redacted here" rel="nofollow">
<img width="768" height="511" src="https://redacted123.tld/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/redact-768x511.jpg" class="webfeedsFeaturedVisual wp-post-image" alt="" style="display: block; margin: auto; margin-bottom: 25px;max-width: 100%;" link_thumbnail="1" srcset="https://redacted123.tld/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/redact-768x511.jpg 768w, https://redacted123.tld/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/redact-480x320.jpg 480w" sizes="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 768px, 100vw" border="0">
</a>
Some body text redacted here.<br>
<br>
<span style="font-size:14px"><a href="https://redacted123.tld/a-post-slug-redacted-here/" target="_blank" style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #007C89;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">Read the article on our website&nbsp;?</a></span><br>
<br>
</div>

The only things I can think of that would affect it loading or not are:
– the link around the image
– the inline CSS added
– the CSS classes added
– the ‘link_thumbnail=”1″‘ attribute
– the responsive image ‘srcset’ attribute

As part of the plugin options, it can turn off the image link, and as part of the free trial of premium, it can disable responsive images.

The inline CSS and CSS class I sure hope would be ignored and not cause issues.

The link_thumbnail attribute might be part of the image link option, I’ll have to check and see why that’s being added by our plugin, remove it as a test.

If you’d like to start a free trial of premium and turn off the image link and the responsive images, see if that helps resolve it or not as well. I will do more testing on my end as well, and see if we can’t nail down what the issue is.

Thanks, I sent a bug report so we can talk directly. I also tried removing the image link and it didn’t fix the issue.

I am also having this issue. The image appears in my Mailchimp preview, and it appears if I open the email from a computer. However, it’s not appearing on my phone for three different email accounts (iCloud/me, yahoo, or my day job’s organization’s email). I’m thinking there must be a setting in the phone’s settings that is preventing the image from coming through. Have you had any luck resolving this? Any tips you can share?

Hi @jlozupone this issue is specific to the Mail app on MacOS and iOS… any other platforms not showing images is usually a different issue.

Best bet is to inspect the web mail HTML, inspect and isolate the image URL, and test that URL in a browser to see if it loads ok.

There are also options in most email clients to show or not show images… so that is something to double-check as well.

If you’re still having a continued issue, it’s best to use the plugin’s contact form to submit a Bug report, and we can nail down specifics of the issue you’re seeing.

Thanks for the reply. The issue resolved when viewed in browser, so I added some language for folks. The other solutions are beyond my skill set currently, so that’ll have to do for now.