Email body images - base64 or link to source?

Question

I got a question, since i know that mail providers look up on many different particulars in emails and then decides if email is spam or not, do you think it's safe to send if i got:

inside the email body, is this assumed for spam?

Or is it safe to use base64 encoded images in email body , instead of using link to the image source?

thanks

Answer 1

Nope, I send a ton of emails with images in the body which regularly have a spamassassin score of 0.3 out of 4. Use your regular <img src="x.jpg"/>. Just make sure you have a good amount of real text.

If you're a 'trusted sender', meaning you send a high volume of emails that people don't mark as spam, you can get away with all images. Examples of companies that do this off the top of my head are Seamless Web and Lego.

I could see base64 code either being stripped or setting off the spam alarm though, based on how many hack scripts there are that use base64 to obfuscate code and then run it.