Do "common mail clients" support 301 redirects for loading images?

Question

In my company we are moving from http to https for as many sites as we can. In the end we redirect from http to https with a "301 Moved Permanently" (and set the HSTS header).

Now following question came up: What happens if we send a HTML newsletter with references to images via http (e.g. http://example.com/image.jpg) after we set up the redirect?

Do "common mail clients" like Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook (2010, 2013, 2016) etc. understand the 301 redirect and load the images via https (the redirect for http://example.com/image.jpg goes to https://example.com/image.jpg)?

If not: What do they do instead?

Answer 1

Yes. I just sent an email containing <img src="http://www.example.com/img/logo.png" alt="not displayed"/>. The example server is in my control in redirects to the same URL with https.

My findings:

• GMail on 24 Oct 2017: It displays the image, but replaces it's location to something like https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/2ks...5hk=s0-d-e1-ft#http://www.example.com/img/logo.png. I guess that all browsers follow redirects and therefore all webmail interfaces should be fine.
• Thunderbird 52.4.0: It doesn't load remote content by default, but after allowing it, the image gets displayed correctly.
• Evolution 3.18.5.2: Same as Thunderbird. Once you load images via Ctrl+I, it's displayed.
• Outlook (unknown version): A colleague confirmed that it's displaying on their Windows machine.
• Mail on macOS (10.3): Another colleague confirmed that it's displaying when they re-open the email. It might just be that the image took a few seconds to load, not sure.