I need to mass-email a bunch of people invitations to an lecture I’m giving. I want to include a photo in the emails to make the invitation more inviting, and I want the photo to sit inside or at the bottom of the text, not as a separate attachment.
The problem is that many of the recipients do not know me personally, so they won’t recognize my name when they see the sender. If they see an email from a stranger with an attachment they will probably delete it.
Is there a way to do what I want to do without the emails having those kiss-of-death telltale attachment symbols?
I agree that a link would be the best idea, but if you absolutely must have the picture show up in the email, you can embed it using HTML. You’d have to first upload it to a place like www.tinypic.com and then add it to your email using the <img> tag.
Note that the recipient’s email client must be set to show HTML messages. It’s normally enabled, but some people turn it off because a lot of spam uses HTML.
Some hosting site is the most sure fire. Broderbund, and probably others, sells software that will include the photo in the message and is compatible with many e-mail providers.
You can’t really do what you want if your recipients are experienced Internet users and are up on the latest threats. Even if they trust email from your account, they know that there are worms that will invade a PC and spam infected email from the PC owner’s account to everyone in the owner’s address book. The advice to insert a link to an image hosting site in the body of the email is a good one, but don’t try to shorten the link by running it through TinyURL or similar: The recipients need to be able to see precisely where the link will take them.
Thanks for all the replies so far. I really appreciate it.
Here’s a new wrinkle. My email service is MSN. On the page where I compose my outgoing message there is a feature on the taskbar called “Pictures & Effects” that allows me to “Share Photos.”
Would using this feature allow me to do what I’m trying to achieve?
You simply cannot exercise absolute control over how your email message will look at the other end; it is largely dependent on the functionality and setup of the recipient’s mail client.
Stay away from special ‘enhanced’ stuff your MSN client is capable of doing if you want the message to look good to anyone who isn’t on MSN. Plain text is great, beyond that people can have serious problems trying to figure out what you’re trying to say.
Keep in mind that many people will not render HTML emails because HTML can contain too much crap useful to spammers. One example is a ‘web bug’, a single-pixel clear GIF image that, when fetched by the email client, lets the spammer know that he has a live address to which he can send even more spam.
How does adding a photo that will cause concern and paranoia make your email “more inviting”?
Recieving unsolicited emails with attachments is often quite annoying, especially if the image is large and/or your internet connection is slow. I can’t help but feel that your email would be better recieved without the image. If you must, set up a webpage to look the way you want and provide a “Further information” link to it in your email. That gives the user a choice about what they recieve.
Worse yet, their computer might not support PETSCII.
Seriously, cazzle’s suggestion is the best. Send out a plain text email that contains a URL to a webpage that has the glitzy invitation you really wanted to send.
Those days are over. If the recipients do not know you, assume that any attachments and any HTML formatting will get caught by their spam-filters or their virus-quarantines and they’ll never so much as see the subject line in their inboxes.
For more and more of us, you can forget including a live link to an image-hosting site as well. Any email to me from unknown parties (and unknown companies, or subject line doesn’t contain “SDMB”, or a few other affirmatively-filtered-in things like that), if it includes the character-string “http”, goes straight into the trash, unseen and unread.
You want to illustrate your emails with pictures, learn how to do ASCII art.
You should send a plain text email, with a good subject line describing the message. If I was sending an invitation to a lecture I was giving I would do something like:
“Lecture on writing good emails, Thu 1/18, 8pm”
It’s short, gives a good idea of what the message is about, and doesn’t look like spam. Anyone slightly interested in the subject of the lecture will probably at least read it.