3 reasons images might be blocked for some recipients

There are three main reasons recipients may not see images in your emails: their email client is blocking externally hosted images, their email client doesn't support background images, or a firewall is blocking access to our image servers.

To cover all situations where images may not load, we recommend always including a link to the web version of your email (which we do by default), setting the alt attribute for all images (which you can do when you upload an image), and using a mixture of text and images in your email rather than basing it solely on images.

Blocked images

To keep email sizes down and increase deliverability, images in emails are hosted on our servers, instead of being sent with the email. Email clients refer to these as "remote" or "external" images, and may be set to display images in:

• no emails
• a specific email (as an exception if images are set not to display)
• all emails from a specific or trusted sender, or
• all emails

All desktop and webmail clients have settings like this, which might be applied based on personal preference, or controlled by a system administrator. In any case, it's not possible for you to override these settings, so your best strategy for dealing with image blocking is:

• Keep your subscriber list well maintained and engaged with premium content they want to view.
• Don't use emails based solely on images, include text as well.
• Make sure all images have the alt attribute set.
• Provide a web version link in the email.

Background images aren't supported

A number of email clients, including multiple Microsoft Outlook versions on Windows, do not support background images. We recommend picking a background color similar to your image as a fallback.

Strict firewalls

Strict firewall rules, such as those found in government organizations, may block our image hosting domains. In this case, the recipient's firewall administrator will need to change the firewall rules for them to be able to see images.

For recipients having issues with their firewall blocking images, the image domains that firewall administrators can safelist are:

• media.beehiiv.net
• *.beehiiv.com
• *beehiiv.net

A sample email you can send to readers:

Hey, it's likely that your employer and/or network has a strict firewall in place blocking the images in the newsletter. You just need to submit a quick request to IT to safelist the following domains and the issue should resolve itself:

- media.beehiiv.net
- *.beehiiv.com
- *.beehiiv.net

This should be a pretty straightforward request, and IT should know what to do with that information.

Thanks!