Why do images sometimes load later?
Some email clients do not display images automatically: your subscribers first need to indicate that they want to see them. This is because of spam. In the past, spammers used images to check whether an email address was active. To prevent this, some email clients delay loading images.
On many mobile phones (such as the iPhone), in most webmail services (Gmail, Outlook.com) and in some desktop clients (such as Apple Mail), images do load straight away. Whether images are immediately visible therefore mainly depends on the email client your subscriber uses to open the newsletter.
When designing your newsletter, assume that some of your subscribers will not see the images: give every image an alt text and make sure your message is also written in text.
How quickly images load
Once an email client fetches the images, they appear almost instantly for most subscribers, as long as your newsletter does not contain an extreme number of images. Large files take longer to load. You can read about the supported formats and file sizes under What images you can use.
If it takes longer for an individual subscriber, this is almost always down to their email client. In Outlook, for example, images load a bit more slowly. Sometimes a slow internet connection also plays a part. It is not caused by Laposta’s servers, as they have more than enough capacity.
Why images are hosted on Laposta’s servers
The images in your newsletter are always stored on Laposta’s servers and are only fetched when your subscriber loads them.
Laposta does not embed images directly in the email, because doing so has three major drawbacks:
- Some email clients do not display embedded images properly, or at all.
- Embedding images is a technique commonly used by spammers, which makes it much more likely that your email will be flagged as spam.
- It significantly increases the file size of the email.