Mail MIME should download and attach references to external or dynamically-generated images.

If I type 'env' at the commandline then it does not show a 'include_path' variable. I am not sure if that is a problem?

From the PHP manual:

include_path string

Specifies a list of directories where the require(), include(), fopen(), file(), readfile() and file_get_contents() functions look for files. The format is like the system's PATH environment variable: a list of directories separated with a colon in Unix or semicolon in Windows.

This is (part of) my test mail body:

<!-- some local file -->
<img src="file:////home/quickstart/websites/sjnab.nl/sites/all/myfiles/auto.jpg" alt="Angry face" width="32" height="32" />
<!-- some remote file -->
<img src="http://www.pdssb.com.my/images/stories/gallery/laptop.jpg" alt="laptop" />

Mail MIME does not convert file:/// links; sorry.

Nor does it resolve references to external websites. It only converts image links that are located within the same domain that is sending mail, and which resolve to Drupal files.

The relevant code snippet is found in mailmime.inc:

protected function attachRegex($matches) {
    if ( ($url = filter_xss_bad_protocol($matches[4], FALSE))
      && ($path = url_to_realpath($url))
      && is_file($path)
      && $this->addHTMLImage($path)
    ) {
      // The parent method will replace this with the actual cid: string.
      $matches[4] = $path;
    }
    return implode('', array_slice($matches, 1));
  }

So if:

• The link address passes the cross-site-scripting filter, and
• The url can be resolved to a local path, and
• There is a file at that path,

then the file is attached.

Even if the Drupal installation that is sending mail is located at www.pdssb.com.my, I'm not sure that the second link would be converted, because "images/stories/gallery/laptop.jpg" does not look like a Drupal file path.

I suppose it would be possible for MailMIME to attempt to resolve and download other (non-local, non-Drupal) image links and attach them, but I would have to carefully consider the impact on performance, security, and file management.

Changing to a feature request.

We are embedding image styles (auto-generated thumbnails) in emails.

When sending the email, the image does not exist on the filesystem. It is generated by drupal on first request.

Mail MIME tries to resolve the path of images to local filesystem, but does not find the image. The image does not get embedded.

We would like to see Mail MIME perform an HTTP get request to download and embed the image, that would be much more reliable, and would avoid all the url to path non-sense that attempts to do the job of the web server.

@cedric:

It's unlikely that we can mount the effort required for investigating, implementing, testing, and reviewing this.

Can you not trigger the generation of the thumbnails in whatever module is using Mail MIME to create the emails?