If you receive an e-mail which contains linked pictures, Outlook does not download those photos immediately by default. You can alter this behavior if you want, but there risks to doing so. Let’s take a look.

To be clear here, we’re not discussing messages that contain photos as accessories or about message into which the sender has actually put pictures (because those work pretty much like attachments). We’re speaking about pictures that contain URL web links to images that are organized online.

When you get a message which contains images, Outlook prevents the download of those pictures and also shows you a message at the top of the mail.

The reason for this is that Outlook has to download these pictures from an outside server, which indicates that the web server (as well as for that reason the sender) will know that your email address is “live” as well as being checked.

This isn’t a problem for genuine senders like close friends, or companies for which you need a live email address (like PayPal, Amazon, and more), due to the fact that it’s fine for them to know your email functions. Even here at How-To Geek, we include a monitoring pixel in our e-newsletter so we can eliminate people that never ever open or check out our messages because we proactively attempt to ensure we don’t spam individuals.

But for actual spammers, it’s a different story. If they understand your e-mail address is energetic, then you’ll become a bigger target for spam and phishing emails. After all, an account that is known to have a human considering it is much more useful for a fraudster than an address that could never ever have a human look at it.

Nevertheless, even worse than spammers understanding your email address is kept track of by a human is the possibility that the photos contain a virus or malware. It’s a popular attack vector, and also it relies on people downloading the image to their computer.

So by default, Outlook protects against the automatic download of pictures– which’s a good idea.

If you click the message, you obtain a variety of choices to deal with this.

The initial option, “Download Pictures,” will just download the pictures for that e-mail, as well as if you know the sender, after that this is possibly the option you pick.

To allow pictures to be downloaded for this customer once again, or for any messages that originate from that domain name, you can choose the “Add Sender to Safe Senders List” or “Add the Domain [domain name] to Safe Senders list” options. In the future, Outlook will after that immediately download photos in e-mails from customers or domain names on your Safe Senders list.

If you intend to check out the photo yet not with your email client, you have the choice of seeing the email in your web browser.

Your web browser can be a much safer location to view a potentially malware-laden photo, however are you a safety scientist? No? Then do not open a suspicious email anywhere, simply erase it.

We can’t stress this enough: If you obtain a message as well as you think it could be a phishing email or harmful spam, delete it and run an infection check on your computer. Don’t fool around trying to open it “securely.”

Which brings us on the choice in the context menu that we’ve up until now ignored: “Change Automatic Download Settings.”

Clicking this alternative takes you to the Automatic Download settings. You can also arrive by heading to clicking File > > Options > Trust Center > > Trust Center Settings.

Then click Automatic Download to show the settings. We’re interested in the “Don’t download photos instantly in basic HTML email messages or RSS products” alternative.

This setting is activated by default, and also comes with a proper warning over it.

To be clear, we’re not promoting turning this setting off, as it’s an invaluable security against both spam and also malware. However, if you’ve transformed your Junk Mail settings up completely to Safe Lists Only (where mail from any type of sender not on your Safe Senders checklist is considered to be junk) after that you might turn this setting off as long as you don’t relocate things from unidentified senders from your Junk Email folder to your Inbox.

Nonetheless, there are a number of default setups switched on which permit photos to be instantly downloaded from risk-free senders, relied on internet sites and also RSS feeds, so there truly is no requirement to turn it off unless your circumstances are quite unusual.

So once more, we don’t advise transforming this triggering other than in really details scenarios, but that’s just how to do it if you intend to.