Preserving HTML E-mails With Linked Images

EagleFiler
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1

I’m wandering a little off-topic here, though in fact it is part of the same quest: to preserve HTML emails complete with all linked images such that they will display correctly even when the links have gone dead. Is this something that should be possible in EF? My experiences have been mixed, with some displaying incompletely or with mangled layouts (overlapping images etc). Is there a way that I can tell EF to download all linked images and keep them with the message file?

2

No, and I’m not aware of any e-mail software that does that. My advice would be to print the e-mail as PDF if you want to preserve the styling and layout after the links are dead.

How are you seeing any images at all if the links are dead?

Sorry, there is not.

3

I am testing HTML emails whose links are not dead with a view to assessing their long term resilience.

Thank you for your useful straight talking. For anyone else looking into this issue I did start by thinking that PDF might be the way to go, but the quality of PDFs generated from emails is very variable and dependent on the email client (Mail actually makes quite a good fist of it). I then switched to Webarchives, which gives better results where there is a “View in browser” link in the email. Finally I found that Mail Archiver X has a way of storing emails with remote images baked in. (And for information, though I have not tested it, it sounds as though DevonThink does not.)

4

In this case, I think the layout issues were due to limitations of EagleFiler’s current display engine, not issues with the mail data that it had archived. You may find that the display is better if you set EagleFiler to use Quick Look or if you double-click to open EagleFiler’s copy of the message in Apple Mail.

I’ll look into adding the ability to download the linked images into EagleFiler. However, this would need to be an EagleFiler-specific display feature. There is no standard format for storing such images, and e-mail clients don’t know how to display “remote” images in a .eml file using locally stored images.