Hi folks

 

Is there any advantage to hosting images (for use in HTML email campaigns) on a secure server (https)?

 

We're thinking it might avoid the images not showing initially in email clients because they were delivered insecurely.

 

Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that - look forward to your comments.

I don't think so. Isn't the reason for images not showing usually to avoid the old "embed and hit" routine - when an e-mail loads it requests the image from the target server and hence they know you've opened the e-mail? By encoding a key (or even the full e-mail address) in the image URL, it used to be used by spammers and bulk mailers to verify that addresses were real and worth sending more of their junk to.

 

I think you can usually avoid this by embedding the images inside the e-mail (as multipart MIME). But then you can get some very large e-mails which will increase your bandwidth, their download time, and may bounce at certain mail servers.

Connetu is on the right path... Using https for email marking images is a complete waste of time, and will siply cause you more headaches than it solves.

 

You may also find that it causes problems with mail clients and security certificate data, and/or corporate emails where https may be blocked to stop employees spending all day shopping lol... (Seen it done too)