40. Why Is There a Blank Box in My Outgoing Email?

Here's a tip about your signature, or sig box, (and why your image and/or background may not be showing up.)

Let's say you've found a really neat image on the internet, and you've placed the codes into your sig box to cause that image to appear in your outgoing email. But instead of there being an image, all you and your recipients can see is a blank box, or even worse, a domain logo or an embarrassing message. You have double-checked the codes and they are correct. Then why is this happening?

Here's the catch. Tripod®, along with Angelfire®, Geocities®, FortuneCity® and others have blocked "remote linking" to their images.

What is remote linking? Well, you are on the WebTV Network. But suppose the images you have chosen to use are not on the WebTV network, but on the Tripod network. When you "link" to those images, you are "remote linking" because you are asking a "remote" host to serve up those images to display in your email. In effect, you are using someone else's bandwidth. Technically speaking, you are guilty of bandwidth theft.

Think of bandwidth in this manner. A network, whether it is WebTV, Tripod, Angelfire, Geocities, or anyone else, is composed of many "servers." A server is a computer through which you connect to the internet, and which "serves up" such features as your Home Page, your personal webpages, your email, and most anything you can see, hear, or do.

Since we are part of the WebTV Network, we rely on WebTV to "serve up" our internet experience. In like manner, Tripod "serves up" content to Tripod members, and Geocities does the same for their members.

Each time we link to an "outside" source, we are asking another company to "serve up" certain "content," whether it is images or music.

The use of these "outside" sources causes a computer somewhere to begin "serving up" the images or music that we have requested to be shown. If we use an "outside source," other than WebTV, we are using up someone else's bandwidth.

Bandwidth costs money, whether you are talking about storage capacity, online time, or the sheer number of servers required to "serve up" such content.

However, when we just "visit" a webpage, we are exposed to their advertising, and that is where most of their income is derived. Likewise, when we provide a link to an entire page, rather than hot linking to just one image on that page, the viewers have an opportunity to click onto one of their advertisers' banners, and that's how they get paid (by the number of "hits" on the banners.)

But when we ask this "outside" server to present linked images to our email recipients, those recipients do NOT have any opportunity to view any ad banners, nor to purchase anything from the advertisers.

So, in effect, those servers to which we remotely link are forced to "serve up" content without any possible hope of compensation. Therefore, many hosting services have blocked remote linking.

What can we do about it? What should we do about it?

As users of the WebTV service, we should learn to place "outside" images into our own files, namely, the WebTV Scrapbook. Then, when we "link" to an image, we will be linking to a WebTV server, for which we already pay a monthly fee.

We can only hope that some day, WebTV (or MSN-TV®) will allow us to also store music files. For now, we must be satisfied to link to those sites which still allow remote linking to music files.

For information about how to get images into your scrapbook, please see:

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To learn how to place those Scrapbook images into your own email, see:

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