Yes, of course, and that's why it's best not to put the important information into and image. Of course, many senders do this anyway, but at least it requires them to send me an image. No different really than sending me a link to the important information as I mentioned in my post.

But let's not make this even easier or default please. It's bad enough as-is.

A nice improvement would be for prominent clients like gmail to default to NOT display images. This would force bulk-senders (including legitimate ones) to stop putting the important info in images most of the time.

Ditto with links - maybe the clients should stop making them clickable, forcing the user to copy-paste the link. Not sure about this one...

There's been a recent trend to add animated gifs into email, where the gif is a never ending stream. It's often a timer/countdown to the end of a sale or something.

This would be so that even if the server remotely fetched the gif, it would never end, and thus either consume the available resources on the server, or they give up.