HTML Emailing Tool

AMO

I want to be able to send out emails to a list of clients and have them appear as a rich HTML page (I assume I need a website setup for some of the images to link to).

What is the easiest way forward to achive this? What tools are needed? The list of email addresses might not come from a database.

Thanx

AMO

espresso

Most e-mail clients will allow you to send an HTML rich e-mail rather than a plain text e-mail, do you not receive Martin's money saving tips every week? Simply change the compose set-up options, a website is not required. You will need some method of creating your HTML but there are many packages that can do this.

wolfman

I'd advise sending a multi-part email. That way it includes both the text and html version so you get the best of both worlds.

nickmack

If it's something like a newsletter with quite a few images in, you're probably better off hosting the images, rather than including them inline. Recipients won't thank you for sending them messages hundreds of Kb in size. If you look at most email newsletters, they host their images rather than put them inline.

I use a program called JMail which works with our email server. If you are sending to a large number of recipients then it works well. You basically make an HTML page as a newsletter and then use this as the body of the message. A script is executed that retrieves the addresses from a database and sends to each recipient.

AMO

Thanx for that. Is the HTML newsletter created in Dreamweaver first? How is it linked into the email? Do you save it as a HTML page first?

Thanx

AMO

nickmack

I use Dreamweaver, you can create the page in any HTML editor you like.

With JMail, you specify in the code that the body of the email is HTML and then provide a link to the HTML page. All images are referenced by absolute URLs otherwise they won't work when it arrives in the recipients inbox.

AMO

Thanx Nick.

I appreciate the advice. I am trying to ascertain what is the best way forward for a non-techie when I pass this to our marketing girls.

From what I can tell, there are the following barriers:
1) Absolute linking of objects in the page.
2) Transfering the page from the HTML tool to an email to be sent.
3) Sending multiple copies of the email out via the email client to various different people in the address book.
4) Being able to save the HTML page without it saving the page locally and converting the links to relative links.
5) Setting the email to send as HTML.

Now as far as I can tell, its not possible to do this via accessing contacts in Outlook, only Outlook Express and various third party tools.

So in essense, to get this working I need to:
1) Get the user to design a web page and make sure any objects and links are absolute.
2) Save the HTML page.
3) Open up an email client.
4) Set it to HTML format?
5) Paste the HTML page onto the email.
6) Send.

The problem I have is that I can't paste the HTML into the email and for it to look like a web page - all you see is the HTML source.

How do I achieve this, say with MS Outlook?

Thanx

AMO