Since upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista some months ago I have found a major difference in the way pictures are received as e-mail attachments in Windows Mail. At the top of the screen, immediately below the toolbar, the following message appears “Windows Mail has removed access to the following unsafe attachments”. Following this message is a list of code numbers for each individual picture. I am no longer able to click on each number in turn to reveal the picture on the screen as I formerly did with Windows XP, but instead I need to use the arrows at the side and bottom of the screen to scroll small portions of the screen. The picture is hugely expanded so only a small part of each picture can be viewed, and then the arrows must be manipulated downwards or sideways to reveal the next part of the picture. This hardly makes for a satisfactory method of viewing pictures. I tried to overcome this over-zealous attitude to e-mail security by lowering the Windows security protection level, but this did not seem to have any affect. I am also protected by Norton Antivirus. Is there any way in which I can revert to the easy method of viewing e-mail pictures that I previously had with Windows XP?

It seems that we may have two separate issues in play, so we will deal with each issue separately. First, the message about Windows Mail removing access to attachments is not a new question and this feature was also available in Windows XP. This function is designed to allow Windows Mail to be helpful and block potentially dangerous attachments. Unfortunately this results in quite a few legitimate attachments also being blocked, so many people disable this function and instead rely on their own judgment as to whether an attachment is potentially harmful to their computer before opening that attachment. Also, since you are running Norton Antivirus, this should integrate with Windows Mail and provide virus scanning functions to assist in ensuring that any attachments which are received do not contain a potentially harmful virus. If you would like to continue and disable the unsafe attachments feature in Windows Mail go to the “Tools” menu > “Options” and click the “Security” tab. On this tab untick the option “Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus” and then click OK. You should restart Windows Mail to make this setting effective.

The second part of your question is a bit more intriguing, but I think that I have understood what you are trying to describe. When using Outlook Express in Windows XP, the picture attachments in Outlook Express display as a listing just below the address information in the email message. I imagine the reason you said they were code numbers is because the name of the pictures probably looked like they were coded in a particular way, such as IMG_1234.JPG, which is the numbering scheme of the pictures from the digital camera. You could then click (or double-click) on each of these picture attachments to open and view the picture in an external program (most likely the default Windows Picture and Fax Viewer application). Since these pictures came off a digital camera it is likely that they are very large in size. Windows Picture and Fax Viewer generally understands that such pictures are very large and will display the picture at a zoom level which will fit to your screen, so that the entire picture can be viewed without the need for scrolling. However, in Windows Mail it seems that the pictures are being displayed within the email message itself. When pictures are displayed within the message, Windows Mail will generally not scale or zoom the image to fit within the Window, thus it is showing at full size. Because the pictures are so large, this means that you need to scroll around to view the image. Obviously this is not ideal, as you generally want to see the image all at once rather than having to scroll and only view a portion of the image at a time.

As a first method to work around this problem, you should double-check that Windows Mail is not providing you with a listing of the attachments on the email message somewhere different in the window. It may have been the case that Windows Mail was not displaying the listing of attachments previously because they were being blocked by the security feature in Windows Mail which prevents the user from opening attachments which could potentially contain a virus, so it would be worthwhile to double check that now the setting has been disabled whether the listing of attachments returns. If so, they should be able to double-click on the picture attachment (as you did previously), to open the picture in an external viewer which should scale the picture to fit the screen.

However, if you find that the pictures are not appearing as separate attachments then it seems that Windows Mail is handling the pictures differently to Outlook Express, treating them as in-line content within the email message rather than attachments which need to be viewed using an external viewer. There is still a way to launch the attachments within an external viewer so that they scale to the size of your screen and can be viewed in a more convenient way than having to scroll around the screen. Right-click on one of the pictures and select “Save Picture As…” in the context menu that appears. This will allow you to save the picture to a location on your computer, such as the My Documents, My Pictures or Desktop folder. Once the picture has been saved, navigate to the folder in which the picture was saved and then double-click on the picture to open in the viewing application. While this is a bit more of a cumbersome workaround than you previously would have been used to when using Outlook Express in Windows XP, this at least is a way to view the images at a scaled size rather than their huge size within an email message.