JGreg7 said:
I have a new installation of Outlook 2007 and I want to unblock images and
links in the incoming e-mails. It is a nuissance to have to unblock each
image in an e-mail to read it.
Our company firewall is very strong, by the time it gets to me it is safe,
so I do not need the extra step of unboking links and images.
Any help would be appreciated.
Malware is NOT what blocking images is about in e-mails. Blocking images is
about thwarting web beacons that can determine if spam hit a valid mailbox
and that it is monitored (because you opened the e-mail). It is not likely
that your "firewall" will do anything about the linked images. If it did,
the effect would be even worse than now in that the firewall would block the
images and nothing you did in Outlook could unblock them (because they were
never received with the images intact). Also, a firewall does nothing about
linked images (which can be used as web beacons) because YOU via your e-mail
client is making an *outbound* connection to get the images, not some
unsolicited inbound connection that the firewall would block.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon
Only linked images are blocked, not embedded images. If the sender were
sending you just one copy of their e-mail, they wouldn't care about
embedding the images. It is because the sender is spewing out bulk e-mails
to many recipients that they want to reduce their transmission time and
bandwidth and disk quota consumption by reducing the total size for ALL
those duplicated e-mails. If the images are linked, the sender is a boob
that doesn't know how to embed their images or they are spewing out bulk
mailings. If this is for personal e-mails, or e-mails with a customer, tell
them to embed their images rather than making you reduce your security to
accomodate their stupidity.
If you are intent on reducing your security (despite what you claim
regarding your firewall protection) then go into Outlook's security options
to disable the external image option. In OL2003, go to Tools -> Options ->
Security tab -> Change Automatic Download Settings. Navigation may differ
in OL2007.
