HTML help - Email Sending

yeah that won't be easy to do......for me at least I'll pass it back to the guy that put it together and hope he'll sort it

Originally Posted by 600+

yeah that won't be easy to do......for me at least I'll pass it back to the guy that put it together and hope he'll sort it

When you pass it back, just mention that you can't send it out without the formatting looking wrong, and ask if he has any advice.

I'm guessing it uses CSS, and the different rendering engines handle CSS differently. He may know which engine (and therefore which application) would be better to use for the template he's made.

However, if you're insistent on using Outlook 07, then he has to design the template for that, you're the client after all.

and he is a mate doing it for free

I've been looking on the net to find maybe a web based way of doing it but been unsuccessful up to now

We are currently busy writing an app to generate our news letters in the office (though we use a purchased .Net component to send the original mail) (http://www.aspnetemail.com/).

The developer who has done it found a lot of HTML email best practices sites for refrence and has built ours accordingly.

The most important thing is, contrary to building a page where you should use divs and spans with CSS for layout, to use tables.

The other thing to mention, again contrary to building a web page, is to use inline styles. If you *are* going to make style classes ensure that they are located outside the header tag - many mail clients (online and real apps) strip the header sections out for display purposes. Do not use linked css and use it sparingly - outlook 2007 strips *a lot* out so you won't get the display you think you are going to get.

If possible embed images - this way people still see you mail how you intended and not with lots of red crosses.

When I get into the office on Monday I'll ask the dev for the links to the best practices and post them up.

We send out up to 40K news letters and spend a lot of time making sure they are not picked up by spam filters (we only send to people who have done a double opt-in we do not just bomb mail addresses). HTML email is not a problem for this - how the HTML is built can make a difference as does the 'from' address and how it's sent. For the last I can't comment as we use an external company to actually do the mailing.

Good luck - this can be tricky, but is worth it in the end.

cheers MavUK - that would be useful as well.

[timwilky]

HTML in email is the bain of my life. Why oh why must people do it?

It doesn't format properly in my companies mail client. My personal email is sent as text only.

I even received an email today that contained a Word document, no covering text etc. I had to open a potential can of worms to find out what the lease company for my car had to say.

Originally Posted by timwilky

HTML in email is the bain of my life. Why oh why must people do it?

It doesn't format properly in my companies mail client. My personal email is sent as text only.

I even received an email today that contained a Word document, no covering text etc. I had to open a potential can of worms to find out what the lease company for my car had to say.

Quick answer... Because the marketing department see it and goes wow...

can I ask what client your company uses - if it's more picky than Outlook 2007 it's something I'd like to pick up at work for our mails...

[timwilky]

We use Lotus Notes for mail/groupware apps at work


At home I use the linux mail command in a bash shell

Originally Posted by timwilky

We use Lotus Notes for mail/groupware apps at work


At home I use the linux mail command in a bash shell

You know since asking for the info I've been thinking 'I bet it's notes...'

Oh well, I guess this is one that we won't be looking into then

Thanks for the info...

Best practice:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters/

En gratis goede html templates (trans: free, good HTML templates):
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/
Of
http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/html_email_templates/

Just got these links from the dev. Good luck!

And another one...

http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/

You can use the one above to check how 'spammy' you mail is.