outlook 2007 not displaying pictures in some emails

Please help - MY outlook 2007 isnt displaying some pictures in some emails and hasnt been for some time.......its not all emails.
Today an email from Costa (no pics showing)popped in with the banner at the top about
"click here to download pics. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of some pictures in this mesage.
view pics, add sender to safe senders list etc etc- I cant remember the exact banner but its pretty standard. I clicked to save the sender to safe senders and still the pictures arent showing - just a red x (placeholder)
I am unable to right click on those placeholders
I have already unticked the box in trust centre - automatic download

nothing changes

I'm not an Outlook user but rather a Thunderbird user and I can tell you I purposely never have e-mails show embedded images unless I can validate and trust the e-mail source for the following reasons:

A link to an image (not an attachment) will rat you out. Especially if it's only a 1x1 pixel image you can't see. When I say rat you out by that I mean just the simple loading of an external image will share your public WAN IP address to the e-mail sender (whom ever that may be)... It'll also tell the image sender what browser or e-mail client you're using via the UA (useragent). And believe it or not, an image CAN be laced with a malicious payload.

Even sending an e-mail can rat you out as well, but that's a subject for another day.

Having said all that, have a look here:




Block or unblock automatic picture downloads in email messages - Microsoft Support

You might find the following articles interesting. Especially if you're a lawyer, private investigator, etc...

Why the Air Force is investigating a cyber attack from the Navy

Navy Seal's lawyers received emails embedded with tracking software | US military | The Guardian

Honeytoken - Wikipedia

Edit-

I also never show full HTML in e-mails but rather just the text of the e-mail. Being computer savvy I can still make out the e-mail even though it'll look like crap. Some e-mails are completely coded in HTML and for those I first validate the living crap out of the e-mail sender and address before I even allow the HTML displayed and parsed. There's also I think an unpatched CVE for PGP in e-mails where certain malicious HTML in an e-mail can steal your private key. Again, for PGP encrypted e-mails.

- - - Updated - - -

Ah, just reread your post again. If there's a red X it may mean the linked to source for the image is nonexistent. You can find out by looking in the source headers of the e-mail and looking for the image link in the e-mail. Now simply visit that image link in a browser. but ONLY do this if you trust the source. Try browserling in lieu of your normal browser. Browserling will allow you some three minutes of virtual browser time on their servers to load some weird link on their end rather than on your computer. I do that all the time, and for the occasional spear phish e-mails I use my VPN and a browser in Sandboxie to feed their bogus website with garbage. Then off to spamcop.com (a Cisco run company) to report them. LOL!

thank for the reply. I would have said i was extremely tech savvy ten years ago, then we had our daughter...my pc time is negligble now.
Unfortunately the link to the microsoft site, was my first port of call..it makes no difference at all whether that box is ticked or unticked.

i suspect that the cause of this - (apart from the outdated software im using) is the link and settings in IE - when im now using another default browser -or potentially that the registry value (and consequently the actual temporary folder) is incorrect for outlook.

What id like to be able to do is force (in the emails that arent showing correctly the) the banner to show again - but i am unsure of how to do that...