Malling and Hotlink Protection

[MEVi]

Hello,

I have activated the Hotlink protection but the emails that my members receive do not have an image (avatar). Would you change anything to correct this?

[CoffeeCake]

Where have you activated hotlink protection?

Typically, hotlinking looks at the referrer that a web browser sends as part of its request and ensures that it matches some rule before returning the file. If a person is looking at an e-mail that references your web site's address for the avatar picture, it's going to hit your web server as a request from mail.google.com or similar, which will probably kick in the hotlinking protection through whatever mechanism you've enabled it.

I don't recall a hotlink setting in IPS, so I'm guessing this is a web server configuration or perhaps CDN?

If you want to allow certain images to be served and bypass the hotlinking rules, you'd have to work with whatever is providing that service to find out how to define exceptions. With Cloudflare as an example, you can place images in special paths that indicate they're okay to be hotlinked, while other images that you don't want hotlinked aren't okay. You could achieve this with IPS by defining a file storage location for the image types you'd like to allow to be hotlinked, that matches the special path rules they use.

If you want to embed the images in the e-mail, I don't think that's an out of the box feature, but perhaps some custom development could achieve that.

Alternatively, you could set some exceptions perhaps (again, depending on the service) to allow some popular mail providers to get past the hotlinking rule, yet that might be a challenge and would not address the issue with thick client e-mail programs that may still get a broken image (again, depending on how you're blocking them).

[MEVi]

The protection is at the level of .htaccess. I need to research if the avatars can be in a folder that would be excluded from the rules of the hotlink protection.

[CoffeeCake]

1 hour ago, MEVi said:

I need to research if the avatars can be in a folder that would be excluded from the rules of the hotlink protection.

What are your htaccess rules?

Yes, you can choose the location of where specific types of files are stored. Create a storage configuration at the path you want your avatars to be stored (and be exempt from hotlink protection):

Then, attribute avatars to that storage configuration you created. IPS will move the files for you in batches if you'd like, or you can move them in advance of switching the configuration: