How do I create an HTML E-Mail?

Factual Questions
1

I know with Outlook (which I use) I can choose to make any e-mail I create text or html. However, Microsoft does an ungodly horrible job of of formatting the html behind the e-mail. This results in various other mail program stripping or ignoring certain sections meaning what the recipient gets may not look like what I sent (and in this case that is important to me).

However, if I just cut and paste html code into an e-mail and send it I get an e-mail with html code. This is also particularly a problem for embedded images since the mail does not know to send the images.

So how can I manually build my e-mail in html (using a separate html editor) and then get that into an Outlook e-mail and send it so it looks right on the other end?

2

I know how to do it from a vbscript file…
*
Set Mailer =CreateObject(“SMTPsvg.Mailer”)

Mailer.RemoteHost = “(your mail server)”

Mailer.FromName = “You”
Mailer.FromAddress = “you@yourdomain.com”
Mailer.Recipient = “whoyouaresendingitto@theirdomain.com”
Mailer.ContentType=“Text/HTML”
Mailer.Subject = “Subject”

Mailer.BodyText = “Your html code goes here”

Mailer.SendMail*

But I’m guessing that’s no use to you.

3

And that code requires ServerObjects ASPmail to be installed on the machine running the vbscript, I believe.

Not sure if Outlook can be trained to do this - it has options for whether or not to use Word to format messages, but I think that’s just about as much customizing as it can do.

Going with a non-MS email program may be your best bet. There are probably a few good free ones you can download, but I don’t have much experience in this.

4

You can’t really do it. You have to send it from a server configured for it. And as you noted, many email programs strip out HTML, or CSS, or replace it with their own proprietary substitution code, so you can’t guarantee the results will look anything like what you want. Online email like Hotmail or Gmail are the worst for that.

Oh, and to add to all that, junkmail filters flag HTML email more often than plain text, by default.

For something so widely promoted within apps like Outlook, it’s remarkable how difficult it is to actually achieve it.

5

Bah…figures it couldn’t be something simple (as noted one would think it would be).

Ahh well. Thanks for the answers.