CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

As majority of our target mail clients are outlook users we have constant request to try to prettify the mailings.

Personally I would prefer not increasing the mail traffic several times just for some eye candy, but the feature had been requested and insisted on in almost every strategic meeting.

I guess I can justify it with following rationale:
- if CiviMail allows for attachments and if these attachments are images then there is no waste of resources if it would be possible to use those images from the attachment in e-mails html instead of http images.

So, I hacked a working solution by changing

CRM/Mailing/BAO/Mailing.php
and replacing the line

$message->addAttachment( $attach['fullPath'],
                                               $attach['mime_type'],
                                               $attach['cleanName'] );

with

$message->addHTMLImage(  file_get_contents($attach['fullPath']),
                                                $attach['mime_type'],
                                                $attach['cleanName'],
                                                false );

which did not work at first as because there seem to be some bug in packages/Mail/mime.php (which I could not completely understand and didn't have time to examine in depth, reported it but got can't reproduce status). Still, when I commented the

if (isset($this->_headers['From']))
in function &get (this one is supposed to make oid reference include the domain, which is not essential and is somehow broken).
 
After this - success: CiviCRM was happy to send out mailings with images encoded inline which works nicely in Outlook (2003 and 2007) and Thunderbird - instant display without user needing to confirm it.

Gmail still does not show them by default and you are required to allow it.

The above is just proof of concept (by simply replacing the attaching code it now does not handle normal attachments very well :) ), but I though I should share it and see if there is interest to do it and, more importantly, comments on how to do it properly.

Best,
Goran