Missing graphics for some recipients in Outlook

[CellucomGroup]

Is anyone else all of a sudden not seeing graphics in CC sent emails?  Last Thursday we had 3 (maybe more) employees all using different OS and outlooks just stop being able to see the graphics of our company emails from CC.  We've googled and looked at security settings and enabled features, etc.  Can't seem to figure out why suddenly some stopped being able to view graphics. 

Anyone else experiencing this?

Has CC changed some settings?

Any advice on what to look for?

help!  I have no idea if any of my 3000+ customers are also experiencing this from our emails.

:)Audrey

[CellucomGroup]

Hello all. We understand this issue has been ongoing for a period of time and we apologize that we have not provided a timely update. As previously mentioned, there was a change made to our SSL certificate configuration back in June that we believe had solved the issue with missing images in Outlook and Mac Mail. After further research, it appears that the issue goes beyond our initial fix. We assure you we have been looking into the reasoning why this keeps happening to our customers and your contacts.

We'd like to gather some specific information to see if we can narrow it down to some specific programs or settings. This brings us to our next step in fully tackling the issue. In order for us to keep track of these items and escalate them to the appropriate team to further research, we need some help from you.

Please email us at communitysupport(at)constantcontact(dot)com with the subject line "Outlook/Mac Mail Image Issue Information" and include as much of the following information as you can (the more the better):

• Your username
• The names of some affected email campaigns, as listed on the Campaigns tab
• Email client/program type and version. Here's how to find the version of your affected email client:
  • 2003, 2007: Help > About Microsoft Outlook
  • 2010: File > Help
  • 2013, 2016, 2019, 365: File > Office Account
  • If using Outlook webmail, please include the browser type and version. Most browsers list their version under Help > About.
  • Mac Mail: Mail > About Mail

• What is the exact behavior of the images? Red X, "Linked image can't be displayed" message, "Right-click here to download pictures" message, etc?
• Rough timeline of events, if known. Did it work previously? If so, when did the problem start? Does it seem to be all campaigns or just specific ones? If you have an email that used to successfully display images, does another test or resend still look good, or is it also affected now
• Screen shot of the issue in the email client
• If possible, save the email as a file and attach it to the email. 
  • In Outlook Desktop, open the email so that it's in a separate window. Next, click File > Save As. > Outlook Message Format - Unicode (*.msg). HTML is also fine.
  • In Mac Mail, open the email and select Choose File > Save As and select Raw Message Source as the format (.eml)

Once we receive the information attached, we will forward it to a team that will gather all of the information and further address the issue.

We understand that this is a lot to ask of you, especially with the issue persisting for a while. We again apologize for the lack of an update on our end.

We are locking this thread for the time being while we gather information. We don't want this action to be perceived as us ignoring the issue but instead allowing us to focus and put our resources towards a solution. We will check in and provide updates as we find out more.

[GaryD675]

Hi Kara.  Thank you for the quick reply.  The social media icons are built in to CC and not in my media library.  I can't change them nor can I see a URL for them. 

From what I have gathered, this issue appears to only happen on Windows 7 machines.  I really hope it can be resolved soon.

[BrianB7187]

Hi Kara, yes, your recent upgrade caused the images problem just in the past week for me.  You reference you are waiting for outlook to catch up.  I use Mac Mail 7.3 on an older mac running 10.9.5  i no longer get images in CC emails from any of the constant contact accounts I use to send out emails.  your "upgrade" should not prevent our emails thru CC from not being seen by thousands of people who use older softwares. 

[GaryD675]

Very well said. I do not get the feeling that CC is appreciating the gravity of this situation. We have already discussed switching services.

[GrantB9]

Hi,

Any idea when or if there will be a fix for this? I only discovered this as some of machines are running Outlook 2003.

Ive done the workaround as explained above for my current campaign, but its a bit of a pain for each image.

Cheers,

Grant

[LimorD]

For a month now (maybe more) the emails from Constant Contact have stopped displaying images that are part of the newsletter, when sent to Outlook desktop clients. It occurs both when testing by ourselves to our own outlook system, and when we circulate the actual final newsletter (it did display in mobile devices though).

We have verified that no new measures have been implemented on the organizational level, and have verified that our outlook version (we checked number of various versions) are set to the least protective level, as they were before. Nothing helped and the emails are incoming now with the images labeled:

"The linked image cannot be displayed. The file may have been moved, renamed, or deleted. Verify that the link points to the correct file and location"

previously it said: "Right-click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet."

Do you have any suggestion to the reason why it occurs, and better yet, how to fix it?

[William_A]

Hello @LimorD ,

We've recently updated our own security certificates, which we're still waiting on some versions of Outlook to catch up on. While our engineers are looking into the issue you're describing, it'll ultimately come down to Microsoft making sure all of its email systems are up-to-date. Making sure the domains we use are safelisted in your system may help let the images through, as we've seen that resolve similar prior issues with specific email clients blocking images.

We've also seen this issue pop up in Outlook before, which Microsoft has discussed and provided some potential workarounds of their own.

[GaryD675]

William,

Your response is appreciated however conflicts with Kara's reply we received on March 2nd.  There is nothing for Microsoft to "fix".  This is an issue on your end as stated by 3 different Constant Contact staff members (recorded in chat transcripts).  You folks really need to get your ducks in a row and come together to fix this problem.  I know I am not the only one already looking into alternative providers specifically because of how Constant Contact has responded to this issue.  

Let’s be clear....

1) Constant Contact is the ONLY email service provider that seems to be having this issue.

2) I have been using Constant Contact with various companies for years now without issue.  This is something that just started happening recently – as per all of the other comments in this thread! 

Just to appease, I did check the setting that the Microsoft article refers to.  That option was already disabled.

I do hope that with all of this information, you will be able to provide a helpful update on the issue.  Thank you again for all of your time and efforts.

[William_A]

Quite honestly, I'm not sure why the chat reps default to the "this appears to be an issue on our end" line whenever they see an active service request, including ones that are explicitly noted to not be an issue on our end. Regardless, this is down to Microsoft simply not updating some of their older versions of Outlook yet, as explained by Kara on March 2nd. Our engineers aren't going to be able to rollback a major security update that was necessary to begin with, and that pretty much every other email client is fully compliant with. 

If we ourselves have an update on this issue that we're able to provide, it will be communicated. Until then, as of the time of this response, the issue remains isolated to specific versions of Outlook and will require MS to resolve. This is fully in line with what Kara explained on March 2nd. 

This mass thread will continue to be updated, so that we can keep these posts consolidated for our engineers when they communicate with Outlook. If you're subscribed to this thread, then you'll likely continue to receive subscription updates, even when it's merely another thread being merged in (such as with Limor's).

[GaryD675]

Hi William,

Thank you for the quick reply.

1)  I did not "default" to the issue being on your end.  That is what I was told by 3 separate CC staff.

2) If this is simply an Outlook issue, how do you explain the other comments on this thread where people mention multiple OS's?

3) So if this was caused by a TLS 1.3 update on your end, why on earth would such an update take place that would ultimately affect so many people?

4)  Let's suppose the update was indeed "necessary to begin with" as you say.  How on earth is a major update like this done without warning people in advance?

So please correct this statement if it is wrong:  The bottom line is that unless 3rd party vendors (ie: Microsoft & Apple), add backwards compatibility for TLS 1.3, Constant Contact is now only compatible with a limited amount of software.  

[William_A]

1) The statement was in reference to the wording of the chat agents, nothing at all to what you've been saying in your various posts in this thread and others. I apologize if the wording of my response came off that way.

2) Outlook is an email program. Operating systems (OS's) would be in reference to iOS, PC, Android, etc. While there can be some significant differences in functionalities between versions of the program depending on the OS of the device, the security elements are generally pretty comprehensive between all variations. If there's a comment in the thread that's using the term "OS" in reference to an email client, we'll try to make sure that wording is cleared up during our regular check-ins with Voice-of-Customer and other dev teams.

3, 4, and the final bit) The issue is with specific older versions of Outlook that MS hasn't updated yet, and have been trying to resolve on their end as well. Security certificates and other security elements are regularly updated by companies all the time. There is (from what I've researched) never really been a need to "warn" our customers of better security, because it's something that the major email clients will normally have already updated to - i.e. we update our security system to match what the major clients utilize.

[GaryD675]

Thank you again for your quick reply William!  Very much appreciated.  I'm certainly not trying to be difficult or argumentative.  In regards to #2) I should have been more clear, sorry.  There are people on this thread saying that this is also happening in other email clients.  Older versions of Mac Mail for example.  That wouldn't be the case if this was strictly an Outlook issue?

But this last bit is true isn't it?

Unless 3rd party vendors (ie: Microsoft & Apple), add backwards compatibility for TLS 1.3, Constant Contact is now only compatible with a limited amount of software.  

[William_A]

No need to apologize, I (and the rest of CTCT) understand the concerns and problems of this issue, especially since there are undoubtedly many other users still using the affected versions of Outlook. 

I've modified my original response a bit to hopefully make my points a little more constructive and explanatory. 

As far as the issue affecting older versions of Mac Mail, that is something the engineers are looking into as well, but so far appears to be hinging on the same expectations currently set for MS. Regardless, our engineers are doing what they can to gather info, and address the issue from our side in a way that doesn't result in retroactively causing additional deliverability issues from trying to attempt a security update rollback.

[GaryD675]

Good morning William.  Lots of new posts in this thread every day.  The latest from PeterP003 is a good one!  Why is this only happening with CC emails (for me as well)??  Interesting info about his externally hosted image which works just fine with https.  Are you still not convinced that this is a Constant Contact issue?

[GaryD675]

Constant Contacts latest response to me on this issue....

Hello Gary!

Thank you for your response, I understand it's important for you to have an update so I wanted to share with you the information I have gathered from our second tier of support. We have been communicating back and forth with Microsoft on this issue. So far the information they have given us as far as a fix/workaround is outlined in this article. At this time this is the only information we have gotten back from them to correct this issue. I can be sure to add your information to be contacted if/when there is a fix, there is no timeframe currently to determine the fix but once we get more info we will be sure to reach out. Are you okay with me adding your contact information so we can notify you when this occurs?


Microsoft's knowledgebase Article for this issue: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/troubleshoot/message-body/https-linked-images-in-html-email...


If you run into any issues or questions along the way, please feel free to visit our Help Center, where you'll find helpful information and other ways to get in touch with our Support Team.

Thank you for using Constant Contact,

[PeterP003]

We have the same issue. Different people on different systems not seeing the images and only on CC mails. Even the mail from CC itself didn't show the images. The workaround of taking off the s from https seems to have worked, although this requires additional time so is not a long-term viable solution. Neither am I convinced that this is exactly the issue as we tested with an externally hosted image which was https and this worked fine. It is absolutely a CC issue that needs to be fixed to stop us and others going elsewhere.

[GaryD675]

Great post.  Great information.  Thank you @ PeterP003

[MichaelD6303]

See https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=files.constantcontact.com&s=184.25.254.11&latest.

The cipher list used by the Akamai endpoints publishing the image URLs for Constant Contact campaigns has changed recently resulting in older Windows and MacOS implementations being incompatible with TLS negoiation requirements to render images embedded in Constant Contact campaigns.

Can the previous cipher list be rolled back to restore compatibility with these older systems?   There are still very common, and the additional security gained by removing the older ciphers really isn't warranted for this application.

[MichaelD6303]

Interesting distinction.    Campaigns originating from Constant Contact customers embed images from Akamai enpoints host behind the CNAME files.contactcontact.com, but campaigns from Constant Contact themselves use the CNAME click.c.constantcontact.com to store images.

The TLS configuration behind click.c.constantcontact.com has much broader platform support than files.constantcontact.com.   See https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=click.c.constantcontact.com.

Can the cipher configuration at click.c.constantcontact.com be configured at files.constantcontact.com?

[FGCC]

I have confirmed that CC is to blame for images not being displayed in outlook for Windows 8.1 Pro Computers (2010, 2016, 365). Other campaigns with embedded images work perfect. Please fix this, we use CC multiple times daily for both internal and external news and etc.

[CIDInsurance]

Previously, I was always able to click the 'Download Pictures' options at the top of my emails from Constant Contact to see the pictures within an email. As of about 2 weeks ago, this stopped working. It seems something has changed with the connection to Constant Contact because I don't have this issue when receiving emails from other people, companies, services, etc.

I've gone through my email settings with our IT department and they were unable to find a solution. I've also gone through the suggested solution articles from Constant Contact here, here and here. The only thing I have not done is safelist Constant Contact's IP addresses. I will be working with my IT department to try this today, but I am wondering if there is any other solution to this problem? Any help would be appreciated.

[FGCC]

That is exactly the problem we have. the only common factor is windows 8.1. 

[MarleneU27]

Hello,

Since the updates changed on March 10th, I have had to create brand new blasts for our buildings. I have noticed that when the eblasts get sent out, photos do not appear/load on the recipient's end in their inbox. I did a send test to myself & photos are not appearing. There is a small red x in a box and it says "The linked image cannot be displayed. the file may have been removed, renamed, or deleted. Verify that the link points to the correct file and location." This has never happened to me before. Any input as to why and how I can fix this? Thanks!! 

[Kyle_R]

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update on this; we've been investigating the issue with our cloud host to identify the root cause and see what solutions are available on our end to get this resolved. As more updates become available we will post them here. 

In the meantime, we just wanted to summarize some of the workaround provided in this thread for anyone just finding it:

• Here is a workaround for a setting change that can be done in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019.
• Here is a different workaround that can be used in the above versions of Outlook and Outlook 365.
• As previously mentioned, you can also change the image URL's used in an email to start with HTTP instead of HTTPS. I'll paste the steps Kara previously listed below:

For each image that is not showing:

• Click to open the image as if you were going to change it
• Right click on the image
• Copy image address
• Go to the Image URL tab
• Paste the URL
• Remove the "s" from the https, leaving the image as http
• Preview the image and insert it.
• Repeat for all images
• Test to outlook client

[Rahoeft]

Has there been any update? I'm still experiencing this issue.

[Mary_S]

Hello @Rahoeft , Thank you for checking in on the issue. I am sorry your images not displaying as you expect. Unfortunately there has been no update or change in the situation.

At this time the same workarounds are being suggested:

• Here is a workaround for a setting change that can be done in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019.
• Here is a different workaround that can be used in the above versions of Outlook and Outlook 365.
• As previously mentioned, you can also change the image URL's used in an email to start with HTTP instead of HTTPS. I'll paste the steps Kara previously listed below:

For each image that is not showing:

• Click to open the image as if you were going to change it
• Right click on the image
• Copy image address
• Go to the Image URL tab
• Paste the URL
• Remove the "s" from the https, leaving the image as http
• Preview the image and insert it.
• Repeat for all images
• Test to outlook client