Writing an HTML email for a mailing list - image woes!

[Brain101]

I'm trying to write an HTML email for our company's internal newsletter, and am having trouble finding a way to neatly send it. I have a feeling I may have gone about this backwards - I wrote it as an html page, and am trying to send it using Outlook 2003. In hindsight, this may have been a bad idea

Basically it's a 10K html file with about 20K of images. When copied and pasted into Outlook, this somehow turns into a 70K email. It also changes all the images from direct links like "src=http://www.blah/blah.gif", and tries to embed the images in the email. Worse still, when viewed in some mail clients it lists all the images as separate attachments.

Is there a better way of sending it, or will I need to redesign the email somehow? Help!

 

[Conrad11]

Hi there,

Before I suggest anything, I just want to say that this may not be the best method, or what you are after but here goes:

What you can do is add all the e-mail address' to a database and then use PHP to send the HTML e-mail and it should come out in HTML with all the images linked to where you originally linked them too as the PHP wouldn't change the e-mail as Outlook does unless you want it too.

Hope that helps...

Thanks...

 

[nav...]

format -> untick send picture from the internet.

now image links remain as such.

 

[Beansprout]

I'm trying to write an HTML email for our company's internal newsletter, and am having trouble finding a way to neatly send it. I have a feeling I may have gone about this backwards - I wrote it as an html page, and am trying to send it using Outlook 2003. In hindsight, this may have been a bad idea

Basically it's a 10K html file with about 20K of images. When copied and pasted into Outlook, this somehow turns into a 70K email. It also changes all the images from direct links like "src=http://www.blah/blah.gif", and tries to embed the images in the email. Worse still, when viewed in some mail clients it lists all the images as separate attachments.

Is there a better way of sending it, or will I need to redesign the email somehow? Help!

Why not put the newsletter on an intranet and send out a weekly reminder with a link to the page?

 

[joilet]

i built a similar system where i work for sending out newsletters so subscribers of the website and internally. its written in ASP. its basically a html template and the dynamic stuff loops through my sql database picking up the latest news articles and other stuff.

When i want to generate the newsletter i go to the newsletter screen on my internal IT manager website and it takes me to a page where i can select which items i want to appear in the newsletter. I then hit generate and it lets me preview it. i also have the option to edit the code there and then if i want to. Once i'm happy with it i proceed to the next screen and i get options where to send it. the app uses the built in CDO mail component to mail itself as a html file. It sends itself to a distribution group i have setup in active directory with the members in. All the images are linked from the webserver so the actual email size is only a few KB. the html file gets saved into a folder, but its actually displayed in the email and not an attachment.

For the internal newsletter i have made a subscribe and unsubscribe feature which mainly uses LDAP to add and remove users from the distribution group.

I've made loads of these systems for various needs. If you want to use one of mine you can. I have basic ones where you can copy and paste the html and it proceeds to preview and email it. they get more complicated where some of them generate dynamic content and have the subscribe and unsubscribe functions. you will need an ASP server, but thats included in all windows server operating systems and professional series client os. You dont need an sql server, depending on your needs you can use a flat file or xml. since i have made them for specific needs, they won't exactly cater for your needs, but the programming will be there, you will just need to customise it.

Let me know if your interested and i can talk you through the installation and tell you how to modify it. You could end up with a nice internal newsletter systems which automates itself.

 

[Brain101]

Many thanks for all the help (and even the offer of some software!). After reading all the advice, I read up on doing it via a script. PHPmailer has made life a lot easier

Cheers again!