The practice of including visual content directly within the coding structure of electronic messages, rather than linking to external sources, involves encoding image data within the HTML framework of the email. This method facilitates immediate display of pictures without requiring the recipient’s email client to download images from remote servers. Base64 encoding is a common technique used to represent the binary image data as text, which is then incorporated directly into the HTML code.
This approach offers advantages such as ensuring that visual content is always displayed, even if the recipient’s email client blocks external image downloads. It also reduces the reliance on external servers, making the display of the visual information independent of website availability or link integrity. Historically, embedding images was a preferred method to guarantee visual consistency and presentation across various email clients, given their varying support for linked images.
