Cannot view email photo attachments

[BarryC]

This just started maybe a week and a half ago or so.
I belong to two groups on Yahoo called Churchpictures and Churchcrawling. In the Churchpictures group people share photos of churches by sending them through group email. In each message the photo attachments are at the bottom in thumbnails. You click on the thumbnail and then the Yahoo system scans it for viruses and then you get a download link. When you click that you get a box giving you the option to open or save. If I choose "open" the picture comes up. But not anymore! Suddenly it stopped working. I now get the full-screen error "the page cannot be displayed". Like I said, this has been going on for maybe a week and a half, or two weeks. Another member who lives in Texas appears to be having the same problem, but the British members are not experiencing this. I'm not sure about our Tennessee member. Today as an experiment I tried saving it instead of opening it right there. I saved it to my hard drive and I was able to view it from that location. But there's no way I will save all the pictures and view them afterward. No way. Something is definitely wrong here, but I don't know what. Maybe some setting got changed in this computer.
If anyone can help I'd be most gratefull.
Thanks,
Barry

[DoctorDoom]

If it happened to more than one person, it's Yahoo's issue. I'd suggest emailing Yahoo support and asking wassup.

[Rhino]

What do you have in common with the other members who are experiencing the same problem?

Yahoo scans for viruses on your PC? Or are you viewing these pictures online instead of in your e-mail client?

My impression is that something has changed in your e-mail software, your virus scanner, or both. If you and the others have one or more of those things in common, then that impression becomes more likely to be the truth.

[BarryC]

Well all I know for sure is that after I go through all the normal steps to view the picture, and then the picture comes up, the address in the address bar is a file location in my temporary internet files. Even now when the photo won't show, it's still a file location in my temporary internet files.
You see the last step is that Windows dialog box that asks if you want to view it or save it.

I use Yahoo email, and don't use Outlook Express or anything like that.

[Rhino]

My impression is still the same.

Out of curiosity, do you view your mail online, or does Yahoo download it to a mail client on your PC? I'm not familiar with how Yahoo handles mail, but it sounds like it's online webmail. That might help explain the problem with the file location.

[BarryC]

It's online webmail. I do not use OUtlook Express, as I said. I assume that's the mai client on my PC that you are referring to. But attachments are not viewed on any website. You get the windows dialog box that asks if you want to view it or download it. Viewing it puts it in your temporary internet files. Yet I cannot see it.
I'm starting to get the impression that maybe something changed with my temporary internet files settings? I don't know.

[BarryC]

Well this is gonna sound stupid. I went into the tools menu, chose internet options, and checked out my temporary internet files settings, and they looked good. All this time I have been deleting them by pressing that "delete files" button in there. So I went into Windows Explorer and found the temporary internet files and manually deleted everything except cookies. There were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of files in there! So then I just opened an email message with a photo attachment and tried to view it, and it worked, no problem. Cool!

Edit: Not so cool. It was only one image that I was able to view. I've been digging further into the problem, and I've now figured out what is happening, although I can't figure out what to do about it.
When the filename of the attachment is one word or group of numbers, or group of numbers and letters, everything is fine. But if the filename of the attachment has underlines (___) in it, then once the file is put in my temporary internet files, the underlines are replaced with "%20". I found that out by manually searching for one of the pictures in the temporary internet files. Each underline was replaced with a %20. I manually removed the %20 and then the photo was viewable. But why is this happening, and what can I do about it? This is just bizarre!

[Rhino]

%20 is the ASCII control character for an underscore. That's very likely their software causing this. It's unfortunatley quite common on the internet because URLs store those as ASCII characters. However, they should be reinterpreted as underscores when downloaded to your PC.

You can read a little about it here.

http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm

[DoctorDoom]

%20 is the hexadecimal code for a space (decimal code 32). Ergo, a URL containing a space, e.g., ".../photos/this pic is cool.jpg" would be displayed in the address bar as ".../photos/this%20pic%20is%20cool.jpg".

Good Web practice is not to use spaces, but rather the underline _ character (the shifted character of the key to the right of the zero key in the top row), e.g., ".../photos/this_pic_is_cool.jpg".

You might suggest that your sites do a little file name editing to strip the spaces.

One place where spaces can bite the user is in an emailed URL, where word-wrap at the end of the line can truncate the URL.

[Rhino]

Space...underscore...po-tay-to...po-tah-to. :rotflmbo:

At least I got ASCII right.

[BarryC]

A few months ago our member in Texas had trouble with the pictures that were sent that had the underscore in them. His computer was converting the underscore to a %20. When that was happening to him, it was not happening to me. Now I think it's happening to both of us.

The guy who is sending the pictures that have the underscores in the filenames says he isn't doing anything differently than at any other time. At least he said that last time this was happening. Last night I asked the guy in Texas how he was able to fix the problem last time, but he hasn't responded yet.

[DoctorDoom]

If the browser is converting an underscore _ (%5f) to %20, there's a hiccup. It MAY be that the browser is set to a non-default encoding. If you're using IE, go to View > Encoding and see what it says.

[BarryC]

Oh wow. You know so much. I went to View > Encoding and found that it was set at Western European (ISO), not Western European (Windows). I'll go see if things are cool now.
Thanks.

Edit: Nope, still doesn't work. I switched it to Western European (Windows), because I seem to remember that being correct. I re-booted and then tried viewing a photo attachment with underscores in it. It didn't work. I found the photo in the folder in temporary internet files and then moused over it, which brought the windows preview up, but still I could not view it without removing the %20s.

As Herman Munster would say "Darn, darn, darn, darn, darn!!!!!!"

[Rhino]

Western European (ISO) is the default.

[BarryC]

So far nothing I've done has had any affect on the problem. The guy in Texas who is experiencing the same problem simply gave up and stopped trying to view the photos. He just deletes every message with a photo in it.
Way back on September 8 I asked about it on Annoyances.org. The only response was someone asking me what email program I use. I said I use Yahoo webmail. The subject was dropped like a hot potato.
Either no one knows a darn thing about it (which seems impossible), or no one is interested in helping. I don't know. I'm trying to think of other places where I can ask. There has to be people that no more about this sort of thing than I do. Maybe I should ask Yahoo help next. But still it seems like a computer problem to me. But then what do I know?
Like I've said, I'm not doing anything differently and the senders of the emails aren't doing anything differently.
Thanks,
Barry

[DoctorDoom]

If you have Outlook Express, you can set it to read and send Yahoo email.

Outlook Express (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/website/email/email-04.html)

POP Yahoo! Mail Plus with Microsoft Outlook Express (http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/mailplus/pop/pop-08.html)

[Rhino]

Doesn't sound like a computer problem to me. Sounds like a Yahoo problem.

[BarryC]

I've never used Outlook Express in my life, and I've been using the internet since about `96 or so. With Yahoo I never felt the need, especially now since Yahoo has given me unlimited storage for some reason.

Anyway, just a while ago I tried an experiment. I went to my dad's computer and opened up an email message with photo attachments, and was able to view the photos, even the ones with underscores in the filenames. I noticed that my dad's default photo viewer is Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. (That computer has XP.)

So I came back to this computer and tried setting up various other programs as my default photo viewer, such as Microsoft Imaging and MS Paint. With either of those programs set as my default photo viewer I am able to view all email photo attachments.

So this leads me to believe it's an IE problem, but with this computer only, because I tried setting my dad's computer to use IE as the default photo viewer, and it still worked.
So whatever's going on, the problem is with Internet Explorer in this computer. So for now I've got MS Paint set as the fefault viewer. So now I have to figure out what is the problem with IE in this computer.
Barry

[BarryC]

I just now got through all the hundreds and hundreds of emails that were unread since August 31 when the problem started. I'm now completely caught up. But I wish I could view the photo attachments in IE rather than Imaging or Paint. Oh well. I will get my own computer back some day!

[DoctorDoom]

It may be a security setting in IE. Tools > Internet options > Security

[Rhino]

What program opens to view pictures is a Windows setting, not IE. It's set in Windows Explorer - Tools - Options - File Types. You can specify whatever program you want to open various image files.

[BarryC]

You have to choose some program. The default in this computer is IE. I went into Windows Explorer - Tools - Options - File Types, and it was set at IE. This is what I said.
Photos show up on webpages fine. If someone emails me with a photo embedded in the email message, it shows up fine too. But photo attachments, which I have to choose to either view or download, cannot be viewed. They have to be downloaded first and then viewed. Something had to have happened to cause this! But if I go into Windows Explorer - Tools - Options - File Types, and change the setting from IE to Microsoft Paint or one of the other similar programs, I can view them.
Oh, and by the way, I changed my security settings as Doctor Doom suggested, but it had no effect.
I am completely out of ideas now.

[DoctorDoom]

Suggestion: download Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/), the Swiss Army knife of freeware graphics programs. When you run the installation, you'll have the option to set it to open a huge variety of graphics, sound and video files. When you select them it automatically associates the file types with itself. Also download the plugins to greatly expand the capabilities.

And be prepared to spend a while exploring its power. It's amazing what it can do.

[BarryC]

Sounds very interesting. I'll check into it. Thanks for the suggestion.
But still this mystery really gets me. Good thing this isn't my own computer.