Images Not Loading on Outlook webapp

[Anonymous]

Hey Marketo Community,

I want to preface this with I am aware that I am probably one of the last people who uses hotmail.

I was recently running test on my emails to my hotmail account, and noticed on my pictures were not loading on in my account online, mobile is fine.

These seems like it is specific to Marketo hosted images, because I still see the images in all of my other emails, just not my in Marketo emails... Litmus is showing the images on test, but litmus has lied to me before ;-).

I am using Chrome..

Let me know if anyone else has seen this or if you know a fix or if this is user error.

Thanks,

-Ryan

[Josh_Hill13]

I would test this on other browsers.

I would also look through Outlook.com's FAQs to find out how to switch on images. Did you try getting it to show you the HTML it has? perhaps the URLs are coming through wrong.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your response Josh Hill​, I tested it in a different browser and checked the message source to see if the image came into out look wrong.

The marketo hosted images still didn't load.

I pulled the image url from the message source and it wasn't wrong. I'm confused about the turning on image issue because images load fine in emails i receive from other vendors.. in fact, i have images in the emails the emails i am having issues with that aren't hosted by marketo that load fine...

[SanfordWhiteman]

If it's not too strange a request, can you send me one of these emails (swhiteman.consultant@vaneck.com)?

[Kenny_Elkington]

Hey Ryan,

You may have an internal DNS issue.  Can you load Marketo landing pages in your browser?  Can you load these images on your phone?

[Anonymous]

That's very strange. Perhaps if you do more of a search online for this

issue. Maybe Marketo Deliverability team knows of their images getting

blocked on Outlook?

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 3:48 PM, Ryan Mohoric <marketingnation@marketo.com>

[SanfordWhiteman]

Got the message. I'll write back later after investigating (can't view my OWA site now as I'm on the road).

[Anonymous]

Sanford Whiteman​ sent you a test should be coming from experience@omnianightclub.com

Kenny Elkington​ It looks like I can load mk landing pages also images load in gmail.

Josh Hill​ I'll have to check with them, it could be a fairly new issues, we are mostly B2C so i usually test my emails to my personal accounts and it used to work, I even checked so past emails and emails no longer load.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Ryan Mohoric​ I figured it out.

First off, don't mock yourself for using Outlook.com.  Microsoft's numbers say it has 400 million active accounts.  Even if that represented only 100 million active humans it's not something to just ignore.

Anyway, here's what is happening:

• Outlook.com rewrites all <IMG "src=http://..."> tags so images instead load via their internal Image Proxy located at https://<instance>.live.com/Handlers/ImageProxy.mvc. 
• They use a proxy to ensure that browsers don't give a mixed-content warning: since Outlook.com (live.com) loads over https://, you want all your embedded images to load over https:// as well.  This is fine reasoning as it honors the user's intention in using secure webmail.
• Their Image Proxy is unfortunately broken.  It returns a 404 for some otherwise good image URLs when they're fetched via the proxy.  One offender (h/t to Microsoft community user DarrylK on this thread) is the HTTP eTag: header.  It's a perfectly legit caching header that's useful, for one example, when you manage static assets across a server farm.   Marketo asset libraries such as http://experience.hakkasangroup.com use eTags.
• I loaded an image (your JPEG of Carl Cox) via my own reverse proxy so I could strip out the eTag: on-the-fly, and that fixed the problem.
• EDIT 2015-05-23 02:27: Our own Mkto asset library (we are on a different Mkto node) doesn't seem to have this problem, despite returning eTags.  So the cause may be a combination of HTTP-level errors between Microsoft and Marketo that we can't directly observe.  In any case, the available solutions for Ryan and anyone else affected remain the same.

So here are your possible solutions:

• Contact support to set up SSL for your Marketo image library.  If you load images via https://experience.hakkasangroup.com/ then Outlook.com will not need to rewrite them to go through their Image Proxy.  They'll load straight from Marketo and will be fine.
• Host the images somewhere else.  This is obviously an unattractive option.  Hopefully someone at Marketo will become aware of this problem by reading this thread and will understand they can take action as well (such as negotiating a solution with Microsoft and giving you the option to turn off eTags in the meantime). It's a pretty big issue that I bet almost no one has noticed, so good on you for bringing it up.
• Use your own reverse proxy to strip out eTags.  Probably the least attractive option to you.

[Anonymous]

Hey Sanford!

Thank you for all of the advice! I will probably start with the first option and go from there.

When i have used images in marketo that aren't hosted in marketo, I have had issues on mobile.

Thanks again!

-Ryan