A majority of your eDiscovery document collection will likely contain emails. Many emails have images that are visible when you open the email. To the reviewer, you may not realize there are different methods used to make these images part of the email. These methods could affect how your documents are viewed in GoldFynch.
Embedded images
Embedded images, more commonly referred to as inline images, are those images which are added to the email itself, making them part of the email message. Because they are part of the email and not hosted or remote, you do not have to download the images manually by clicking on a button in your email platform (Outlook has a notification that says, "Click here to download pictures")
How does GoldFynch handle embedded (inline) images?
Those embedded (inline) images that are embedded successfully in the email content will be rendered in the GoldFynch document viewer, but not be treated as an attachment and therefore not part of the document family. Click here for a discussion regarding ways to keep eDiscovery costs down by not extracting and imaging inline images, such as logos.
Certain embedded (inline) images are processed as attachments - specifically those in Rich Text Format (RTF) email bodies where you can have a more advanced format like PDF or Word inlined in the email message body. In this situation, GoldFynch will render the inline image as well as extract it as an attachment thus making it part of that document family.
Remote (hosted) images
Remote (hosted) images are images stored on a web server that anyone can open and view. It is very common for companies to use remote (hosted) images for their email signature. This is usually done by providing a link to that image in the image <tag> in the HTML code. The upside of including the images using this method is that the email signatures will always be up to date, and the email file size will be significantly reduced.
Some downsides are that most email clients will require the images be downloaded to protect privacy. See below screenshot showing a common message in Gmail to download the image.
How does GoldFynch handle remote (hosted) images?
GoldFynch will not render these remote (hosted) images and they therefore will not be related family items - they are just ignored.
GoldFynch's email processing servers does not have access to the outside internet content and since remote (hosted) images require access to a remote server to download the image, GoldFynch will ignore these images. A few reasons for this are listed below:
- Downloading these external images can have external side effects, since external images are often used for tracking purposes and to update a "opened" or "viewed" status in the sending mail system
- There is no way to guarantee that the external image / content is the same as what it was when the original email would have been viewed
- Most email client servers default to not downloading external images, so it is likely that the original recipient did not see the external images, or some email client servers will show those only from "safe" domains it knows