images not displayed in email

Hi @mauryg and @craniosedona

@craniosedona
I suggest you read this article – https://support.mailpoet.com/knowledgebase/images-dont-display-after-install-solution/

@mauryg can you see if in your .htaccess you’re blocking hotlinking images in your website?
Something like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://(www\.)?mydomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|js|css)$ – [F,NC,L]

Thank you Valerio. I have already read that article and followed the instructions exactly with no success.

@valerio
Yes, as I said above I followed the article you mentioned. I have reinstalled MailPoet several times and I do not have any image blocking in my .htaccess files. Were you able to see the images at the links I provided?
The fact that the newsletter appears perfectly with all images when viewed in a browser suggests to me that the problem is not the images. I was suspecting the indirect return links via MailPoet or the theme but MailPoet works perfectly on another site I have on the same cPanel host and changing the theme to TwentyEleven on this site doesn’t help.

@mauryg

I am able to view the images at the links you provided. I think the problem here is that the images are not embedded in the email, one reason is because the size of the email will grow very big. It can be issues with the email client also, because some email clients disable the HTML and so the user will not see the email as it would look in the browser.

@automatednewsletter
Thanks for letting me know that the links work.
NO, the images are NOT embedded in the email because MailPoet doesn’t do it that way. Look at this article:
https://support.mailpoet.com/knowledgebase/embedding-images-in-emails-bad-idea/
AFAIK, my Outlook client sends and receives HTML messages and I checked the Trust Policy setting and images are NOT disabled. Add to that the fact that email MailPoet newsletters from one of my other sites work just fine.
Maury

EUREKA! I found my problem and boy is my face RED.
I rewalked the folder tree and and it turned out that my wp-content/uploads folder had a .htaccess file which prevented direct linking to the images.
When I disabled that file the newsletter showed all the images in the email.
Still strange because if that .htaccess file was there to protect the images, how did the direct image links I posted here work? The code in the htaccess file is:

# Stop direct access to files
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://(www.)?barronsquare.org [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://(www.)?barronsquare.org/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png|pdf)$ - [F]

So how do I prevent people from scraping my images and still use MailPoet?

Maury

You don’t. There’s no way to do a Hotlink Protection and at the same time allow all your newsletter images to show up everywhere. :/

I found the problem, hopefully you guys can provide a quick fix:

Mailpoet is not using the correct timestamp of the uploaded images.

I looked at the source of the email and the src is:

“src=”https://christgospel.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Youth-Convention-Live-Stream-Banner-Ad-600×208.jpg”

Since this newsletter was created today, the src should have been written by Mailpoet as:

“src=”https://christgospel.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Youth-Convention-Live-Stream-Banner-Ad-600×208.jpg”

Please fix this, or tell us how to resolve it as there are no options on the Newsletter configuration screen to change the date.

-Jeremiah

I am using this version:

MailPoet Version: 2.6.16 | Premium: 2.6.15

Latest version of WordPress: 4.2.3

-Jeremiah

@jlydia
That doesn’t sound like a ‘timestamp’ problem. The link is pointing to the wrong uploads folder. The ‘2013/09’ link gives me a 404 page image with a lot of stuff on it. The ‘2015/07’ link is the correct current banner ad. But there is no rational explanation as to why MailPoet would change the folder link if you uploaded the correct image to the images tab when you composed the newsletter.

The point was, the problem occurs within Mailpoet as everything is done within the program.

All uploads are performed by adding images from the widget.

Although things look fine during development, once you send yourself a “preview” there is no image shown on the newsletter, as mentioned by others in this forum.

If you view the source of the emailed newsletter, the “src” is wrong.

As you can see by clicking on the “corrected” link, images were indeed uploaded to the correct folders by Mailpoet.

So somewhere in the generation of the actual newletter being sent out, it is pulling an incorrect “src” location.

-JL

@jlydia13
First thing I noted was that your https:// links invoked security alerts because your SSL certificate is expired. This happened in both Chrome and IE.
Second, you say that “If you view the source of the emailed newsletter…”
That sounds like you are viewing the newsletter in your browser, not an email client like Outlook. There is no ‘src’ to view in the email. I never had a problem with the browser view. I think the secret lies in the fact that when you view the email in a browser you have already gone through the MailPoet redirection which captures who opens the email and clicks on something. In the browser all the links are direct.
Try this – open the newsletter from the MailPoet dashboard. Either Edit or Preview should work. Right click on any image in the newsletter or in the ‘Image’ widget and select ‘Open image in a new tab”. Is the URL of the image correct?

I have the same symptom (images not displaying in email) with a different cause.

When I create a Mailpoet newsletter, when the editor composes the email body (this seems to happen during the Saving newsletter… operation), it uses https://mydomain.com as the host location for all images in the email. However, my site is secured using a privately signed SSL cert. This is intentional. I do not want to use SSL for images in emails. I want the non-secure https://mydomain.com to appear in the emails as composed.

Mailpoet seems unable to compose the email that way. I’m assuming that’s because the composer/editor is running under SSL (it’s an admin function after all and I have all admin functions running under SSL for good security reasons) it’s just doing something like “get my URI host and scheme currently, add this to the front of the emailed images, save that as the email body”. In other words, mailpoet assumes that the images in the email should be fetched using SSL just because I composed the email in the secure admin panel. Wrong assumption.

End result is that the emailed images won’t render because they are SSL and the cert is not publicly signed.

I really need a fix for this. I am not going to buy public SSL certs for all my domains when all I use those certs for is admin for WordPress.

If you think about it, it almost never makes any sense for images in non-encrypted emails to use HTTPS to load. They should use HTTP as a rule, regardless of the SSL status when the composer is running.

@mauryg said “First thing I noted was that your https:// links invoked…”
JL: As @synthetic mentioned, this is being generated by Mailpoet.

@mauryg said “Second, you say that “If you view the source of the emailed newsletter…That sounds like you are viewing the newsletter in your browser”
JL: No, I’m viewing it in my email client, very easy to do.

@mauryg said “Try this – open the newsletter from the MailPoet dashboard…’Open image in a new tab”. Is the URL of the image correct?”
JL: No, I get the 404 not found error. Although the image displays correctly in the preview, it does not when viewed in new tab.

If you view the code from the browser, via the element degugger, you see:

<img width=”562″ height=”192″ src=”https://christgospel.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Youth-Convention-Live-Stream-Banner-Ad-600×208.jpg&#8221; border=”0″ alt=”YC Convention Livestream” class=”image_fix” style=”width:562px; height:192px;text-decoration: none;outline: 0;border: 0;display: block;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;”>

Mailpoet is using the wrong uploads folder, as mentioned in my earlier post.

I am a developer as well, this is an easy fix.

-JL

Just want to reiterate I don’t see this thread as resolved.

To be very specific, Mailpoet must not use HTTPS:// based uploads locations to access images from the email message. It has a tendency to do this perhaps because the admin page on which the email is composed is a secure https page. But that is not a reason to make image access from the email as https. Images should all be accessed via the site’s standard URL as found in the ‘siteurl‘ option. For my site, this is correctly set as “https://austinbizwiz.com&#8221;, and that exact string should be used as the prefix to my uploads location as specified according to standards. I use a custom uploads location (set via define('UPLOADS', "uploads/$SiteName"); in wp-config.php), but so far Mailpoet has been getting that right on my system.

My Mailpoet version is 2.6.16 and my WordPress is 4.2.3.