Correction to a statement above

All the text shows immediately, but in place of the message, all I see is a highlighted link to 'image'. s/b All the text in the message shows immediately, but in place of actual images, all I see is a highlighted link to 'image'.

Sounds like remote images from a website and large ones at that which could be made much slower by an antivirus that stops each download and scans it before it can be rendered. Years ago one of the leading brands blocked all images if they came from the same link (which was common with marketing mail that used the same link with your personal identifyer in it and some keywords to actually fill in the correct image. So full tracking was covered by linking the image to a script rather than an image. Just as facebook does with their logo on webpages.