Hotmail displaying only a red "x" instead of a picture

Factual Questions
1

So here’s a puzzler.

My mother’s Hotmail account, as of Thursday, will no longer display embedded pictures in email. Instead she gets a red X and a blank space.

I assumed it was that her computer was out of date, perhaps an older browser. How wrong I was; when I log into her account on MY computer, I cannot see the pictures, either. And yet when I log into my Hotmail account, on my computer, I see pictures just fine. So the problem apparently has nothing to do with her computer; it’s a problem affixed to her Hotmail account.

Just in case I had her updated Explorer and her Java engine and such, to no avail. She is now running the latest and greatest. Still won’t work. I have tried on two computers of my own running different versions of Windows and Explorer; on each computer my Hotmail displayed pictures, hers did not.

Well, folks, I have searched the Hotmail interface all I can and for the life of me cannot find anything that will fix this. My Google attempts have failed as well; it’s a known problem but there are no answers to it that aren’t either very old or, to me, incoherent.

Can anyone help?

2

BTW, she does not use Outlook.

3

I don’t use Hotmail, but have you tried right-clicking on the red X and selecting “Show/View Image”?

ETA: It’s actually wise to not allow the automatic viewing of images in email, because it helps prevent spam.

4

Right clicking has no effect. You can click Show Picture; it does nothing.

I know, but she does like her funny pictures.

5

Are you sure the pictures are actually embedded, and not external pictures that could have been removed?

And have you reported the issue to Hotmail themselves? If the problem spans computers, and the images do exist, then the problem is definitely on their end. And I’m sure they don’t want her moving to Gmail.

6

I have two email accounts, one on Hotmail and one on Yahoo. I sometimes have trouble getting pics to show up on Hotmail emails and decided to try forwarding the emails to my Yahoo account to see if Yahoo could open them. Lo and behold, as soon as I clicked “Forward” to create a forwarding email they showed up. I’ve done that three times now and it’s worked every time.

7

I forwarded the emails to my Hotmail account. They pop right up.

Also, previous emails in which the pictures could be seen are now all red x’s in her account. But not if forwarded to mine.

Yes, but no reply, so I turned to smarter people. :slight_smile: