Re: Images in news mails

On Sun, Sep 7, 2025 at 6:16 PM Tobias Bussmann <t(dot)bussmann(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:

> Am 05.09.2025 um 20:23 schrieb Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org>:
> > This has plagued me for years, and I'm so happy you tracked this down!
>
> I'm happy to hear, I'm not the only one seeing this. Glad to help!
>

What's more amazing is that AFAIK this is the first time *anyone* has
reported this to be a problem. And it's been this way since 2020...

It is also slightly ironic that it's apple mail that's seeing the problem,
given it's quite overrepresented in *generating* broken attachments in
similar ways when you look in the archive :)

> The patch looks good; have you tested in a few other mail clients? I
> haven't had a chance to test yet.
>
> I haven't tried other mail clients myself, but as the style definition is
> just redundant to the img attributes, I wouldn't expect any regression by
> this. But HTML emails are full of miracles ;)
>

Indeed it does. For example, you mentioned the possibility of embedding the
image instead of attaching - that *does* break multiple clients, I think at
least Outlook and maybe also gmail.

> Litmus.com has become quite expensive for render previews, so I looked for
> alternatives. I found Testi.at, which offers some free tests at least.
> Unfortunately, I was unable to provide the full MIME structure there and
> thus could not simulate the CID-referenced image that causes the problem in
> Apple Mail. When I experimented with an externally hosted image, the result
> looked good in the provided previews. However, I visually identified
> another issue: Outlook does not seem to support the 'float' style attribute
> [1 footnote 1]. In the v2 patch, I implemented a workaround to duplicate
> the 'float' style using an 'align' img attribute. Previews of the resulting
> rendering can be found at [2].
>
>
PGEU does have a subscription to a service that could be used for testing.
We'd need to adapt the test instance of the website for it, but that's
fairly easy to do.

I'll also see if I can dig out my old notes for how we ended up in this
stricture in the first place, because it did go back and forth a bunch
before actually merged.

//Magnus