Gmail blocking small embedded inline images in email template

Question

I\'m sending emails to my members and it looks like Gmail is blocking the images I place in the email. These are embedded as a base 64 encoded string in an

Answer 1

tl;dr

Gmail and certain other clients don't like base64 encoded images.

Full Story

The very first thing I did was view "Show Original" in Gmail. To my surprise, raw content still has your embedded image data:

That tells me right away that gmail is simply choosing to filter this content out. I was not able to find the reason. Some guesses point out the length of encoded data itself. Others talk about the general way in which Gmail filters out images. There are even records of this technique functioning a number of years back.

In addition, when viewing the same exact email in a third party client such as Newton(formerly Cloud Magic), I do see images properly rendered.

All of that points to a simple, however sad, fact that gmail doesn't like inline encoded images. Not in the browser and not in their mobile apps.

In fact, at the very end I did discover a post from 2013 by Campaign Monitor blog that concludes with the same results.

Don't use inline embedded images.