Outlook: Download pictures automatically without right-click

Contributed by MickeyMouse February 11, 2006  
Tagged: Microsoft Outlook

So Outlook prevented the automatic download of pictures within your email? Here is how to get outlook to download the pictures without any problems.

Users of recent versions of outlook will see this message frequently:

Right-click here to download picture. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the internet.

First, let me explain why outlook does this. When you download a html-formatted email, your computer contacts a computer (other than your mail server) and grabs the pictures for you. From where those pictures are downloaded is based on the html in the email.

This spammer can use this to his/her gain. By formatting the email with certain techniques, the spammer can use this to detect which email addresses downloaded and viewed the email. If a spammer believes that your email address is reading the spam (by your email program downloading the pictures), then you are more likely to get more spam.

Have I scared you enough?

However, if you have a mail server based spam protection, you may not actually get much spam. If this is true, then you can download your pictures more safely.

Download pictures automatically in Outlook:

1. Open Outlook
2. Click Tools menu
3. Select Options
4. Click the Security tab
5. Click Change Automatic Download Settings button
6. Select when you want pictures downloaded
7. Click OK X 2