Filed under: iPhone
iPhone's Mail lacks no-images switch
Most desktop messaging clients (Apple's Mail.app and Microsoft's Entourage among them) give users the option to skip loading images when reading rich-formatting emails, which both speeds up the loading/reading process and limits exposure to spammer scavenging, which can leverage embedded images to verify that the evil emails were received by a valid address. The iPhone's version of Mail, however, doesn't give users the option to turn images off, as pointed out by Stefan Seiz. This has been the case all along and hasn't been corrected in 2.0, unfortunately.While this exposure is less of a problem if you've got good spam filtering in place, it does raise an interesting question: wouldn't an optional images-off mode be ideal if you wanted to speed up your iPhone's mail performance, or (perish the thought!) limit your data usage on a less-than-ideal service plan. Unfortunately I don't think adding features and options to Mail is within the official capacity of third-party devs, so we're going to have to wait for Apple to address this directly.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
ericdano said 1:10PM on 7-16-2008
That is one reason I don't use it. Thunderbird. The other reason is that it is a LOT slower accessing IMAP email accounts than Thunderbird.
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Ted said 1:12PM on 7-16-2008
You use Thunderbird on your iPhone?
Bobnease said 1:13PM on 7-16-2008
Impressive. :-)
Michael said 1:50PM on 7-16-2008
Good grief. Imagine if you *could* put that non-native bloatware on the iPhone. There'd be no room for any other apps!
Bobnease said 1:12PM on 7-16-2008
Good point, I think a fairly decent (however slightly annoying) workaround might be to set up the Mail app to show a several line preview in the inbox. It at least lets you get an idea of what's there before you open the message and start to load any pics that might be there.
However, a switch to turn the feature off would be very nice.
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Stefan Seiz said 10:45AM on 7-22-2008
That is exactly how i have set mail on my iphone. But i can't tell you how often i accidentially opened a message when i wanted to delete it with a swipe of my finger (with OS 2.0 there is a better way to mass delete now). My SPAM about tripled since i have the iPhone. This is just nuts.
A.Mueller said 1:20PM on 7-16-2008
This is particularly important in the case when you travel internationally. Checking even simple emails can get very costly if some numbskull sends large image attachments.
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cynyc said 3:18PM on 7-16-2008
Exactly!
Nikhil said 1:24PM on 7-16-2008
Even more than that, how about a way to automatically download full messages? I ride the subway, where I'm not blessed with any cell signal at all. I hate sitting down with an inbox full of email (which I had to get BEFORE I got to the station, of course) only to find that they all require me to download the last 7k.
I realize it seems counterintuitive to give a phone offline capability, but not having it is frustrating. I can has Google Gears plz?
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Dave said 1:43PM on 7-16-2008
It would also be nice to have an option to not automatically download attachments. I know it does this if the attachment is larger, but having it for all attachments would be great.
Most of the time, I don't need to see attachments (since I can't really "work" on them on the iPhone anyway).
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Brent said 1:58PM on 7-16-2008
I couldn't agree more. Why can't emails download without the attachments and then the user could manually choose to download attachments. Even a 1mb attachment can stop an iPhone dead in its tracks if you're not connected to wifi. This is an feature that you'd think would be an obvious one for Apple.
destructo said 2:50PM on 7-16-2008
I wish there was SpamSieve for the iPhone. I run it on my desktop and LOVE it, but HATE checking my e-mail on my iPhone because of all the crap that comes directly off the server.
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db cooper said 3:03PM on 7-16-2008
I think a "suppress images" checkbox would also be great in mobile Safari.
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Fozzy Bear said 3:45PM on 7-16-2008
i submitted that as feedback months ago... but of course it probably got ignored because it's makes the user experience 'crap' cuz it's no longer pretty. at least, that's my guess... that or 'it's not high enough on the priority list."