Image Rendering Issue In Outlook Through Microsoft Flows (Office 365)

Vipul Jain

Office 365 Microsoft 365Microsoft FlowsImage Rendering Issue In Outlook

14 Comments

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Henrik Juul5y ago
Wonderful - Seems like this is way to go when you create a HTML mail from any application. Note the link in the img-tag is only the filename, not the including the path
Books Read5y ago
Thanks Vipul , this really helped me & saved my time
Suman Kumar Suman6y ago
Hello Vipul, Thanks for this article, but I am getting one issue as Images are getting displayed in email body along with its coming as attachment. Is there a way to display image in email body only not as attachment?
Kaviya M6y ago
Hi Vipul, please explain the steps. My image is in SharePoint library. I am adding it in both img tag and as attachment file content. Still image is not showing for anyone in outlook client recurrence. Please help with steps.
Neha Rathi6y ago
Hello Vipul, I am trying to use recurrence flow to get all the news posted on SharePoint in an email every friday. The proble I am having is the images are not getting displayed in outlook client. Can you please help?
- Vipul Jain6y ago
  Add your file contents as Attachments in Flow
Neha Rathi6y ago
Hello Vipul,
Mustafa Ahmed7y ago
Hi Vipul, can you describe the steps to embed image to outlook client using ms flows. I am embeding image in mail body but it is displaying as square box.
- Kaviya M6y ago
  Hi Vipul, it is showing both attachment and image in the body of the mail. Please suggest.8
Santosh Prasad7y ago
Finally, I made it, thank you for your help Vipul! Instead of uploading the image to List, just updated to the Image library and used Get File Content and followed above steps.
- Vipul Jain7y ago
  Great, good to know that you liked the article and your task accomplished. Happy Coding !
Santosh Prasad7y ago
Thank you Vipul for the quick revert. Actually, I am doing the same, updating the image in the SharePoint library and using its URL in the List. Is that the way we should do? Else, how to call the File Content directly from the SharePoint Doc Lib?
Santosh Prasad7y ago
Hi Vipul, thank you for sharing this article!, can you please let us know what is the content of "File Content", that you have used for Attachment Content, is this File Content coming from List ? Hoping to hear soon from you!
- Vipul Jain7y ago
  Hi. I have used images saved in SharePoint Document Library for File Content.

Recently, while working on a SharePoint Online (Office 365) project, I came across a very interesting task, i.e., to send anniversary and birthday emailers to the users. This scheduling needs to happen daily based on an individual's birthday or anniversary date.

Task

Send Anniversary and Birthday Emailers. Also, the images are random and every user must receive a different birthday image.

Looking at this task, I thought it’s a very common task and in every organization, developers will be doing this kind of activities. So below are the approaches,

Approach 1

My first approach for implementing this was to develop a Console Application and use Managed Client side object model (CSOM) code. Then this console application will be hosted on a Windows Server. However, this approach had a dependency on Windows Server and the client refused to use this approach.

Approach 2

The second approach was to schedule the Console Application as a Web Job on Microsoft Azure, however, this approach was also not possible because the client didn’t have an Azure subscription.

Approach 3 (Most Appropriate Approach)

The last approach was to use Microsoft Flows in Office 365. In Microsoft Flows, we have an action called “Recurrence” through which we can schedule our tasks. So, I used this approach, however using this approach again introduced the following challenges,

Using the SharePoint Document Library for saving the images

Challenge

The image is not visible in the email body in Outlook 2013 or Outlook 2016.

NOTE
“ISHTML” option in Microsoft Flows was checked, so this was not the issue. Also, from the firewall policy point (from the customer), the settings in Outlook were also checked (as shown below).

Image Rendering Issue In Outlook Through Microsoft Flows

NOTE
I checked with checking the above checkbox also, but the issue remained the same.

Since there were random images, firstly I saved the images in SharePoint document library and used <img> tag in MS Flows.

Using this approach, the image was visible in Outlook Online (in the browser), however, it was not visible in Outlook client (which come with Microsoft Office). I tested it in Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016, but the image was not visible as shown below,

Fig: Output in Outlook Online (in browser – Image is visible in email body)

Fig: Output in Outlook Client (Image not visible in email body)

Using Office 365 OneDrive for business for saving the images
With this way of storing the images, I was getting the same above error in which the image was not shown in an email in Outlook client. I also used OneDrive embedding image, but the issue remained the same.
Using Google Drive and DropBox (open source CDN’s) for saving the images
With this way of storing the images, the issue remained the same.

Solution

Earlier, we tried the following (the below approached didn’t work):-

Using SharePoint Document Library (Picture Library) as the image source (<img src>).
Using images from List Item Attachment
Converting SharePoint Image Content into the Binary format and set as an image source
Directly setting image source as a base 64 string
Using image URL from Google Drive/One Drive and image is shared publically

All the above approaches didn’t work and finally, I found the below solution which worked,

Send the image as an attachment in Microsoft Flows. We need both file content as well as reference, to be passed as shown in above image. The images are saved in SharePoint Library only.

By using the above approach, the users received the image in the email body (as shown below), both in Outlook Online and Outlook client.

Summary

It’s a very common task of sending the scheduled/periodic emails in SharePoint. In SharePoint Online (Office 365), we can implement the same using Microsoft Flows. In this article, I tried to demonstrate all the possibilities for sending an email with an image (in email body) via MS Flows. Hope this article will surely help many.