Have you ever experienced images disappearing when replying to emails on your iPhone or iPad?
This is standard behavior for the Mail App on all iOS devices, such as iPhones and iPads.
Although it can be quite an annoying thing to happen, the reason it happens makes complete sense.
When are the images removed?
The images are removed only when replying to emails.
For example, you get an email from a colleague with a picture of a cat in it. You then reply to that email, and the picture of the cat is removed. In place of the cat picture, you get left with just the filename of the image in this format: <my-beautiful-cat.jpg>. Sometimes, if you have <span> tags around the images in the HTML code, you might just see small lines instead of the file names.
However, when forwarding an email, the images are not removed. This is a good thing since the recipient that you’re forwarding the email to likely hadn’t seen the image before.
Images Being Stripped from Email Signatures When Replying with iPhone
Heres an image depicting exactly what happens to your email signature images when replying to emails using the Mail App on iPhone.
Why are images removed when replying to emails from iPhone or iPad?
The images are removed because if the sender has sent you the image, they don’t need to see the same image again in your reply, right? Makes perfect sense. Also, removing images from replies means there will be less data to store on mail servers, and that’s a good thing!
However, this causes huge problems for email signatures since the whole point of email signatures is to relay your contact information and to maintain brand consistency, which involves having images in your email signature.
Which devices and operating systems does this affect?
This affects all devices running iOS operating systems, such as iPhones, iPads, and iPods.
How can I stop images from being removed in replies?
Go to Settings > Mail > Include Attachments with Replies > Always.
Once changing this setting, all attachments will be included in your replies.
Here are some other workarounds:
- You could always forward emails, instead of replying to them. This isn’t ideal because you would always need to input your recipients’ email address, and the email would be marked with an “FW:” in front of it instead of an “RE:”.
- Use another email client on your iPhone or iPad. There are many other email apps available to download for free, such as the Front App.
Wrap Up
This can be a really frustrating problem when dealing with email signatures. However, there are workarounds which means you can get your images to show up correctly when replying to emails on your iPhone.
Hello
I have a question: it is clear that the images, also contained in a signature, are removed when you reply to a received e-mail containing them.
But it should not to remove the image even from the default signature in the iOS account settings. I note, however, that sometimes this happens. I have to reset the signature and it works again for a while. The image in the signature si linked. Any ideas?
Hi Michele,
I have heard of this happening before, but I must say it’s not very often. It’s so rare that we haven’t been able to replicate the issue in our test environment. I suspect it’s a bug with iOS but I cannot confirm that. If we do find a solution in the future, ill be sure to post a fix here.
This is possible to solve in MacOS at least:
In the Mail app, enable the following:
Edit>Attachments>Include Original Attachments in Reply
Yes, but if you do that you will include all attachments like Word file or something else. Mail app does not work like Outlook that can difference Attach files from images body