No, please no. Then it registers as an attachment and then I can't tell which email you sent me has that very important attachment at a quick glance. Keep it short, sweet, and in 4 lines please.
>I can't tell which email you sent me has that very important attachment
If it's from me then the subject will say "$important-attachment-subject" and the priority will he set to high (but not highest unless you're going to lose money or there is a risk of injury to persons or properties by a delayed response).
Seriously I'd have thought that people would like a vcard that can save them 10 mins inputting data and instead be imported into an address-book with a simple click.
Admittedly I hadn't realised that it got labelled as an attachment (but it seems obvious it should now). But then ...
Oi, I just tested with Thunderbird and vcards (and signature images) are not labelled as attachments. So, are you sure it does in your MUA?
tbh, I don't pay attention to priority ever, since the only people who use it when they email me are spammers.
So the moral is: not everyone uses the same client as you, and not everyone uses email the same way as you. To piss off the least number of people, go for a lowest common denominator thing. This is also why I always use plain text email.
Anyhow, I find images in email incredibly useful - it makes it an extra couple of steps for a lot of things if one has to upload or serve an image and the recipient then has to follow a link to get images.
What area of work are you in? Not big on branding?
I'll have to get some time with Mail.app, does it make no distinction between inline images and attachments either? How about encoded images that are inlined - do they show as attachments too?
I do know that OSX handles vcards very well so I'm kinda surprised it treats them as straight attachments but still don't think that matters so much.
Mail.app handles any attachments as attachments (even inline ones). If images are linked to as part of HTML email it will display them (but not by default due to spam tracking -- you have to click a button to display them), and not count them as attachments though.