One thing that really annoys me about iPhone is the way that Mail has only two options when it comes to loading images within email messages: Load Remote Images On/Off. There is not middle ground option.
Gmail has the best workflow in these situations. By default, remote images within email messages are not loaded. Instead, Gmail adds an option at the top of the page to show images (if you decide that the email is legitimate and you would like to see all content, including images) or to ‘whitelist’ the sender and then always show images for messages from the same address.
iPhone has an inherent flaw in that by default remote images are loaded. So when you receive a spam message that has somehow bypassed your spam filter, it will be loaded along with all remote images - more often than not verifying your email address in the process and opening yourself up to a torrent of spam to your newly “confirmed” email address.
Apple seem to think that they have an option within iPhone to manually load images which is referenced within iPhone’s user manual and on their support pages. Sadly, no such option actually exists.
