HTML Email images hosted by DASP disappear

This is a bizare one!

I created an HTML email newsletter that contains images which are stored at my DASP hosted domain. When I view the email message in Outlook Express none of the images are displayed unless I view each image in my browser first. After I restart my computer all of the images in the email disappear again until I view each one in my browser again.

Images from other domains (ie: msn.com, asp.net) all display correctly, only the images from my DASP domain fail to display until viewed in my browser. Once an image is displaying correctly, if I modify an image's URL path to a different but still valid path (ie: src='mydomain.com\images\logo.png' to src='www.mydomain.com\images\logo.png') the image disapears again until I view it in my browser using the same path entered in the images src property.

I had previously disabled browsing for my DASP account, so I re-enabled it, but it did not help.

Does anyone know what is happening here?

Thanks, Scott.

 

Directory browsing wouldn't have any effect on that (as you discovered), but I'm not sure why the images would fail in your email client. It makes no difference to the server where the file request comes from. In fact when checking around it seems like it's difficult to prevent images on an IIS hosted site from being displayed anywhere (i.e. "hotlinking"). So it certainly isn't something that happens by default.

Have you tried different email clients?

 

Thanks for the reply. I didn't think browsing would have an effect on image links but it was the only DASP setting that I had changed recently.

I did not try different email clients, but I have tried different PC's with the same result.

I will also try putting an image in the root folder to see what happens.

 

An image in the root folder displays fine and even an image in the subfolder displays fine, but when the image is in the "Images" folder of the subfolder (ie: domain\subfolder\Images\) then it won't display.

Here is the exact image code I'm using:

<img alt="logo.png" src="http://www.schneidereith.com/SPN/Images/logo.png" />
<img alt="logo.png" src="http://www.schneidereith.com/SPN/logo.png" />

The first <img> tag does not display the image, but the second one does???

Actually, images in any folder of the subfolder: '\SPN\Admin' or '\SPN\Bin' do not display.

Any ideas?

 

I finally found the problem. It was my Outbound URL Rewriting in the web.config file in the subfolder causing the email image problems. If I disable the Outbound Rewriting everything is fine, but I'm not sure how to fix the problem at this point...

 

Hmm, I suppose it depends on what the rewrite rules are. But that takes it into a tricky area. My regular expressions skills are pretty much nonexistent, but if you post your rewrite rules here someone may be able to spot a problem.