I’m feeling fairly feeble in asking this, but how, exactly, do HTML e-mails work? I’ve been hired to design a tremendously simple HTML e-mail template for a client, and now I realize I don’t have the faintest idea as to how the stupid things work.
I’ve been reading plenty on-line re: the formatting of the HTML (in-line CSS where possible, absolute URLs, etc.) but there’s a basic problem: How do I even SEND one of these? I can’t just paste the HTML into an e-mail message–it always just comes through as the raw code. How does my e-mail editor even know that I’m trying to put in HTML?
If you’re using outlook express, down at the bottom of your email is a “source” tab–put the code in there, proof it with the preview tab. If you’re using outlook, you can open your proposed email as a webpage and ctl+a to select it, ctl-v to paste it in an open email. Goofy, but it works. If you’re sending it out using a mass-mailer system, they’ll have their own setup for where you put the HTML; probably somewhere along the way you’ll pick a “custom html email” selection.
Remember: absolute links for all files and links with the http:// and everything, and make sure you have uploaded the files where they should be. Send a test email to yourself first. Don’t CC everyone, BBC if you’re using a mass mailer, though many spamblocker systems don’t allow BCC. But it’s better than giving everyone on your list each other’s email addys.
One purpose of HTML email is to alert my email program to the fact that you’re a spammer whose posts should go straight into the trash can, unread. Because no one I’d actually want to correspond with utilized HTML emails.
From the spammer’s viewpoint, the purpose of HTML email is twofold: to appeal to the market most likely to buy things just because they’ve been invited to do so, which is to say those people stupid enough to not be spam-filtering all HTML email into oblivion; and to put little image tags in the HTML that call for nonexistent images on their server, which lets them go to the server logs later and get a sense of exactly which email addresses resulted in people actually viewing their ads (the spurious image ref will have a code that corresponds with the email address to which the spam was sent).
Then there are pointy-haired bosses who, being blithering idiots by inclination if not occupational descritpion, think it is professional-looking and appropriate to misuse email as if it were a web-page medium, and therefore hire people like you to create the damn stuff for internal use and whatnot. People like me affirmatively filter that stuff in, making an exception to the all-HTML-into-Trash rule, and then we do a reply-to, quoting the stuff as raw HTML code so that everyone else in the office can see what we see, which is a mess of characters that looks like Shaky Fluffy has been walking on the keyboard again.
Likewise, there are salespeople who have a similar tendency to think this awful ugly stuff is somehow conducive to seling things, and sending it to their existing clientele (therefore not really constituting spam as such), which has the general effect of convincing the existing clientele that they are doing business with blithering idiots who think HTML email is a good idea.
And don’t get me started on HTML-formatted usenet newsgroup postings…
That’s about it. Company gets tens of millions in VC funding and wants to use their shiny new corporate logo. The reason I don’t know how to make such e-mail is because I never read it myself.
Thanks for the advice, Gaudere–I use Eudora on a daily basis, though, which is an application violently opposed to HTML e-mail. No Outlook in the house at all (I’m on a mac, and the PC I keep around doesn’t have Outlook, either.) I finally downloaded a copy of Netscape and used its e-mail component to proof and send the darn thing.
To address one technical aspect of the question - like almost everything else on the net, it’s in the headers, silly.
In this case, email headers are used to list the addressee and recipient of the message, the date it was sent, the subject line… and among other things, the content-type of the message body. This can be text/plain, for a text email, text/html, or multipart/alternative, which can be used to send HTML and embedded images at once, for instance.
We make a newsletter for our potential customers. When they sign up they know that’s the kind of email they’ll be getting (it’s never unsolicited) but it sucks that a genuine email will end up in a spam filter just because it’s got html behind it. Damn spammers!
