Images Not Loading on Outlook webapp

[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]

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.. 😞

[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]

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.

[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