umm, this is how netscape does it too ...

I would have to agree - this is a toggle meant for "in the future, do
this" type of thing.

However, perhaps a dialog should pop up asking "do you wish to load
images for this message?"

ok, that's lame...maybe not :-)

Well, just because Netscape does it that way doesn't mean it's
right.  It seems to me that the gtkhtml stuff could tell 
evolution-mail whether the current message includes images
and that evolution-mail could simply check that and then
trigger a message reload, if necessary.

Obviously, this is not a huge deal, but it would be nice to have
when time permits.

As a result of the UI freeze today, I'm marking all remaining non-1.0 UI bugs to
'future'. Someone reading this should only change the target back to 1.0 under
the following circumstances:
1) The change would not impact documentation. (i.e., 'how to do X' would not
have to be changed in any way.)
2) The change would require trivial work for the programmers involved. Most
likely, only the programmers themselves are able to judge this. So, if you are
not on the evo team, or cannot provide a patch to them for this, you should
probably not make any such changes. 
Sorry that this is going to impact so many irritating bugs, but we have to
prioritize our limited resources.

Apologies for any spam... cc'ing usability-maint on all Evolution usability
bugs. Filter on EVO-USABILITY-SPAM to ignore.

3.12.x and 3.16.0 does re-render the message preview on the option change, thus I'm closing this as fixed.