Outlook Won’t Open Downloaded HTML, Just Shows Hyperlinks

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On my wife’s Win 7 Pro PC, Outlook 365 suddenly stopped opening the hyperlinked graphics in incoming mail, a few days ago. The links open when clicked, not in the body of the message, but in a new window.

There is never an error message or option to view in a browser. When she forwards the emails to another computer, they still do not open.

She depends a lot on email, as I do I. I’ve searched online for hours to find another user with the same problem, but all I get are possible cures for broken links, restrictive settings, etc. I’ve tried the suggested fixes for those issues, and none has made a bit of difference. The only thing I haven’t tried is moving the Temporary Internet File,  because I don’t think that is the answer.

PS: The issue corrected itself as I was composing this. I can only conclude the cause was an unacknowledged Microsoft bug.

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[Bundaburra]

This seems similar to a problem from about three years ago.  The original question was “For the last several weeks, my MS Outlook 2010 client often does not display linked images (maybe half of my HTML formatted emails with images).”

To cut a long story short, it was due to the interaction between Outlook and Internet Explorer.  Even if you never use IE for browsing, and even if it is not actually running, some of its settings can affect how Outlook behaves.  When you open an Outlook message with linked images, the images are stored in “Temporary Internet Files” and then retrieved from there for display. If for some reason that can’t happen, then you don’t see them.  One reason why is due to the IE security setting “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” – if the item is encrypted it will not be saved into Temporary Internet Files.  But even with that IE setting unchecked, there can still be a problem.  If you open an email message with https images, they will display OK, but if you then open another message with http images (or the other way around), the problem may recur.  This was eventually traced to another IE security setting, ““Warn if changing between secure and not secure mode”. By switching between Outlook messages with http and https links, you are effectively “changing between secure and not secure mode”, but because IE is not actually running, it is not able to issue the warning and nothing happens.

That’s my take on it anyway.  With “Do not save encrypted files” and “Warn if changing” BOTH disabled, it should work correctly.

 

Windows 10 Pro 64 bit 20H2

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Bundaburra.

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Lugh

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