HTML enabled email

[theEclipse]

Hello,

I am creating an E-vite for a golf tournament that will be going out later this week and would like to have the email html formatted, with attached images if possible.

I know there are issues with people recieving the email as text (and thus seeing alot of "junk") but this email is mostly an internal and I am not worried about that.

The biggest question I have is that I dont know how to refrence the images that I will have to send with the email.

Thanks for any ideas.
Robert

Robert Carpenter
"You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness." - C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)

http://www.robertcarpenter.net

 

[Foamcow]

You can store the images on a webserver and link to them as you would with any html img tag.

Alternately you may be able to embed them within the email itself. How you might do this depends on what mail client you and your target audience are using.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
I wonder what possesses people to make those animated gifs. Do you just get up in the morning and think, "You know what web design r

 

[BabyJeffy]

You can store the images on a webserver and link to them as you would with any html img tag.

Don't forget that if you do this, you can append some unique data to the image source to track that a particular person has opened the email (assuming they are connected to the internet at the time etc). It's an old trick that has been around for years... aka "a Web Bug" by the media.

Eg: <img src="

http://images.mydomain.com/logo.jpg?u=12345"

... />

This would show up in your web logs and you could confirm that a particular user has opened the email.

Now back to the post... I'd prefer hosting the images on a web server if only for the fact you don't end up sending so much data through the email servers. But that's just me

Jeff

 

[Foamcow]

Jeff, stop giving away all the secrets ;-)

Actually the tracking thing is a very good point. It's the only real way that email can be tracked.

You could append a unique ID for each mail recipient and make the image href a link to a PHP script that logs the hit and then sends the image data.

Also be aware though, that hosting the images means that

• 
  [li]Only people with "always on" connections are going to see them[/li]
  [li]Some firewalls and mail clients will block the images by default (Outlook and Thunderbird do this)[/li]
  [li]You are going to be paying for the bandwidth - with very large mailings that adds up quickly![/li]

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
I wonder what possesses people to make those animated gifs. Do you just get up in the morning and think, "You know what web design r

 

[theEclipse]

Okay so I was able to send an html email both ways (remote imaging and including the images in the email).

The problem is I dont have an easy way to create these messages. The only way I have to do this is tell thunderbird to insert html and copy the web page into the little box that it gives me. Then each image has to be individually added onto the message (unless I use the remote images).

Anybody know of a better way to do this?

Robert Carpenter
"You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness." - C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)

http://www.robertcarpenter.net

 

[tviman]

Using remote images is the preferred method as it reduces the overall load on the mail server and downloads faster on the users email client.

There's always a better way. The fun is trying to find it!