[pendragon]

I have (recently) lost the ability to display images that are embedded in Mail. In lieu of the image I get a blue square with a question mark within.

I cannot even drag the blue square to the desktop and then open it either with Graphic Converter or any other app. It’s as if the image is not even there.

What have I done wrong? Any suggestions?

[pendragon]

Problem solved (on my machine).

What I did:
1. Open Mail>Preferences/Viewing
2. Deselect “Display remote images in HTML messages”
3. Quit Mail and then reopen Mail
4. Go back to Mail Preferences/Viewing and reselect “Display remote images in HTML messages”
5. Quit Mail

After that, when I open Mail all is as it should be

[ghporter]

That's quite interesting. It's like Mail forgot what it was configured to do and you had to remind it. How long had you been running with the same configuration before this issue showed up? Did you change anything, anything at all, shortly before the problem presented itself?

[pendragon]

I suspect I had been in the Blue Square mode for about 5-10 days before I "solved" the problem.

At first I thought the problem was with AOL (my email provider). When I accessed my email directly from AOL, no problems, ergo I knew the images were getting at least that far. So I initially concluded, AOL somehow stopped them from going to Mail thinking they were Spam or such. Or, Mail was "filtering" them; though all that seemed most bizarre.

A day or two passes and I try again to solve my problem. FWIW, I found others on the Apple Discussion board that had the same/similar problem, but with no common resolution.

I had toggled my "Display remote images in HTML message" several times thinking that might fix things. It was only when I realized that toggling does not always change preferences. The rest is history.

There were several shareware updaters prior to my noticing the problem that I considered, but none that overtly affected Mail, at least or so I concluded (guessed).

I suspected the ARD updater, but lack the skills to determined if that corrupted my Mail setting.

My "success" is from Trial & Error (and revisiting my preferences).

My next step was trashing all Mail plists, but fortunately, that was not necessary. But that too is high on my consideration list should the problem return.

If I now find some software does not work as intended, I'll see if there a Mail correlation.

HTH