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When sending out one-to-one or transactional emails (i.e. verification emails), can we include an inline / embedded attachment. Which is an image that displays our logo on the top of the email (HTML format of course).

I've read a few articles online, in particular this one:

http://ask.metafilter.com/84579/Creating-a-graphic-email-signature-without-attachment

Which says, that including embedded images could result in marking the email as spam. Is this why most verification emails I receive from third party services, don't include any images at all, just plain or even just HTML text?

Christian Fazzini
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it basically depends on how long your verification email is. there are spamfilters that check the text-to-image ratio since there are many spams that just consist of one short sentence and an attached or inline image which contains the spammy payload (they try to bypass the text content filter that way). also, there are systems that count the number of attachments with the same hash and mark your message as spam if you send to many of those to the same server. therefore its generally safer not no attach images (which won't be displayed on some email clients anyway).

Gryphius
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  • Good explanation! I'm using Rails. Which allows us to send both HTML or Text formatted verficiation emails, which automatically generates a multipart/alternative email. Our HTML emails contain very little HTML formatting, mostly for font-size and font-style. Is it safe to assume that HTML emails don't get tangled up in the SPAM folder, just because they are in HTML format? – Christian Fazzini Oct 17 '11 at 09:07
  • just the fact that your message has a html part shouldn't trigger a spam taxation. if that were the case, almost all email would land in the junk box since nowadays many email clients send html formatted mails. you should just make sure you have a text part as well. there are some spamassassin rules that fire on HTML-ONLY mails ( http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/Rules/MIME_HTML_ONLY ) – Gryphius Oct 17 '11 at 09:23