Email signature generator › Image not showing

Why the image in your signature does not appear

An empty rectangle where the logo should be is the most reported signature problem there is. Four of its five causes have nothing to do with your markup, which is why rewriting the HTML usually does not help.

Cause one: the recipient blocks remote images

This is the most common by a wide margin, and it is not a fault. Most mail clients can be set to not download images until the reader asks, and several have it on by default. Outlook for Windows blocks by default for senders outside your organisation. Proton and Tutanota block by default for everyone. Apple Mail with Mail Privacy Protection routes images through a proxy.

You cannot fix this from your side, and you should not try. What you can do is make sure the signature still works without the image: real text for the name, the role and the phone number, and an alt attribute on the logo carrying the company name. A reader with images off then sees a slightly plainer signature rather than a hole.

Cause two: the image is not publicly reachable

The logo has to sit at an address that anyone on the internet can open without logging in. Three things that look like they qualify and do not: a file on your own computer, a Google Drive or Dropbox share link, and a file behind a company intranet or VPN.

The Drive case catches people repeatedly, because the link works when you click it — you are signed in. Open the image URL in a private browsing window. If you see the image with no sign-in prompt and no interstitial page, it will work. If you see anything else, it will not.

Cause three: it is not an image URL

A share link usually points to a viewer page that displays the image, not to the image file. A mail client asked to render a viewer page inside an <img> tag gets HTML where it expected pixels and shows nothing.

The test is the same private window, plus one detail: the address must end in the file itself, and what loads must be only the image on a blank background, with no surrounding page. If there is a filename with an extension and nothing else on screen, it is a real image URL.

Cause four: http instead of https

An image referenced over plain http:// inside a message shown in a secure context is treated as mixed content and blocked silently by a growing number of clients. There is no error, just a missing image. If your logo URL starts with http://, change it — this one is entirely yours to fix and takes a minute.

Cause five: the client dropped the tag

Least common, but real. Some rich-text signature editors strip the <img> tag on save if the paste did not carry it cleanly, and you end up with a signature that never contained the image at all. Send yourself a message and look at the raw source: if there is no image tag in what was sent, the problem happened before the message left, and re-pasting the signature is the fix.

The order to check in

Open the image URL in a private window first — that settles causes two, three and four in thirty seconds. Then look at the sent source for cause five. If both are clean, you are looking at cause one, the signature is correct, and the work to do is on the alt text rather than the markup.

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