inline all email images

Problem to solve

When a user attempts to view GitLab common images from Email templates from a location where the GitLab hosted instance is unavailable or an Email server which proxy's images cannot access the GitLab hosted instance, images will always be unavailable. It would be ideal for all images to be inlined in HTML Emails to ensure images are always available to clients.

Intended users

All.

User experience goal

A recipient should be able to view all images provided in a Email from a GitLab instance without having direct access to the GitLab instance.

Proposal

Any images added in an Email template should be inlined in the same fashion (if still applicable) to previous change outlined in GitLab FOSS !373.

Further details

An example use case is a user receiving notification from a GitLab hosted server to a GMail account. If a user receives a, for example, merge request approval, images will provide a reference to the GitLab logo observed in a raw Email source:

<img alt=3D"GitLab" height=3D"50" src=3D"http://<host>=
/assets/mailers/ci_pipeline_notif_v1/gitlab-logo-<omitted>=
<omitted>.gif" width=3D"55" style=3D"max-width=
: 100%; height: auto; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;" />

If a user is on the same network as the GitLab hosted server, they can view the image. If they are not in the same network, images will be broken:

image

In addition, if users have configure their Email provide to proxy images and the GMail server does not have access to the GitLab hosted instance, images can never be cached and cannot be rendered on the user's mail client:

<img alt="GitLab" height="50" 
   src="https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/<omitted>#http://<omitted>/assets/mailers/ci_pipeline_notif_v1/gitlab-logo-<omitted>.gif"
   width="55" style="max-width:100%;height:auto" class="<omitted>">

The following shows a series of examples where users will be presented with broken image links based off their network/clients used:

image

Permissions and Security

n/a

Documentation

n/a

Availability & Testing

n/a

Available Tier

  • Free

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

n/a

What is the type of buyer?

n/a

Is this a cross-stage feature?

n/a

Links / references