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

[Anonymous]

Outlook.com and hotmail.com both wrap images in an image proxy run by Microsoft and hosted by Live.com.

Test emails sent simultaneously from Marketo to @yahoo.com, @gmail.com and @outlook.com will show the images displaying normally at Yahoo and Gmail, and being wrapped in the Live image proxy on Outlook.

This is not a problem unique to Marketo and has been reported to Microsoft as far back as 2012 and 2013:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-osend/why-is-outlookcom-imageproxy-break...

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-osend/outlookcom-using-an-image-service/...

After reading through those old threads with no response, based on my clients complaints I created a new thread here:

Outlook.com adds live.com proxy to images, breaking them. - Microsoft Community

Microsoft has not yet responded. Others have found out that using https for images will work, but some find it only works temporarily and the issue then resumes.

Based on a community post from a hotmail.com manager, it sounds as though Microsoft is doing this intentionally so as to break the 1x1 tracking pixel used by Marketo and many other companies.

Why does hotmail proxy images within html emails? - Quora

[Anonymous]

Thanks Kate.. I am wondering if this just happened over the last week and a half or so because Marketo support doesn't believe me.. 😞

[Anonymous]

This is definitely a major problem.

The emails we have been sending this week have reported a significantly low click & enquiry rate.

Imagine how many others have this problem and don't even know it!

I contacted Marketo Support with the advice from Sanford and this is the reply I received:

Fumio Tokutake 27/05/2015 01:33:09 AM UTC

Hi Kate,  I had a reply from our Services Department. It is not a free service unfortunately. They provide the SSL service at a cost of $1200. If you are happy to go ahead with this, I will ask them to reach out to you.   Best regards,  Fumio

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you want to avoid that cost you could set up with a CDN.  I think just about any reverse proxy "cures" whatever is wrong with your Marketo server in the eyes of Microsoft.

Ryan Mohoric Kate Beckett if either of you want to talk over your options for a few minutes you can contact me via https://purechat.me/sanford.

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's certainly possible that the connection b/t the Image Proxy and Mkto just broke, though the proxy has been reported as breaking with various sites for the past 3 years at least. It's interesting that my own instance isn't broken (vaneckglobal.mktoweb.com).  Maybe you should tell support to compare yours and mine.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for posting Ryan, Im having the same problem.

Thanks for the advice Sanford - I reported this to Marketo a few days ago and they are looking into it. I will direct them here.

Kate.

[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

[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.

[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]

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

[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>

[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?

[SanfordWhiteman]

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