Recently I got a question from a reader who was having trouble forwarding images. She asked, "almost always when I forward e-mails containing pictures (whether the pictures are photos, drawings, cartoons, whatever) I inevitably get replies from people telling me that the pictures didn’t come through. Is it me, or is it my computer? And, is there anything I can do?"
As I told her, the problem basically stems from the fact that there are a so many different e-mail programs and setups out there. But within virtually any e-mail program, you can set your e-mail to be sent and delivered one of two ways: either as plain text or as HTML. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is the language used to create Web pages.
With HTML e-mail, as with a Web page, you see fonts, photos and other graphics. They can be embedded within the e-mail. With plain text, graphics are converted to an attachment. Many people use plain text because it’s actually more secure. (An HTML e-mail can technically run malicious programming code when you view it.) For example, I have my e-mail set to plain text. Everything comes in as an attachment and I see NO fonts, colors, or fancy formatting. (This news was distressing to a couple of relatives who apparently spent hours in AOL playing with fonts and creating wildly ugly formatting that I never saw.)
In any case, the way to ensure people always get your pictures is to save them as an attachment. Instead of forwarding the e-mail directly, save whatever it is you want to pass on (such as a photo, for example) onto your hard disk. Then create a new e-mail, and attach the photo to it. Then send out the new e-mail.