html newsletters sent by email

[Linda3330]

I would like to send newsletters out by email that look like a web pages instead of an attachment but I don't know how. Are emailed newsletters web pages sent as email or are they normally created in some program other than Front Page. When I send a web page as email my pictures don't open.Most of the newsletters I recieve have html code like a web page. How are all those nice looking newsletters I recieve as email created? How can you tell? A couple of examples are http://www.beadshop.com/newsletter/ind and http://www.furr-angels.com/mailing_list.htmex.htm.

[dsch]

Just like you create a website http://www.sitepoint.com/print/code-...il-newsletters
But some mailservers won't parse it as a html document at it will only show the code. Haven't got any problems to send html emails with bluehost though. Try test it. What email client do you use to send out the newsletter?

[rjewett]

The problem is not the mailserver, they just foward the email as sent to them. Some users have email client setup to display emails as text only, but today these are very few, and they are not bright enough for us to bother.

Any email composer today will have the ability to set the message body mime type to HTML. For instance, open up Outlook Express and select the Format menu. Near the bottom you will see either Rich Text (HTML) selected or Plain Text. Select HTML then on the view menu select Source Edit. You will get three new tabs on the bottom of the page, edit..source..preview. Enter some text in the edit window and use the toolbar to change font size and color. Then select the source tab and you will see the html page. You can create html from any source and paste it into the source tab and then view it in the edit tab.

Two things to consider. If you use an html wysiwyg editor sometimes they dot put styles directly in the code, but link to it using markup such as: <link href="css/ryme.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css". The email client can not find the stylesheet because it is a relative path on the server. Be sure to embed styles in a <style tag or use absolute paths href="http://www.ryme.com/css/ryme.css". The same issue occurs with images, be sure that any img tags are absolute paths. You can embed the image in the email, if it is not stored on a server, the body then becomes multipart-mime. Try this in Outlook by clicking on the "insert image" icon. The source markup is a bit harder to read and edit by hand.

Bluehost has a phplist newsletter application. That can compose html email and send it to your email list, but you have to maintain the email addresses in the phplist database. The other issue I have with web based emailers, and phplist composer, and even this forum message composer is that they are web based. They have to process the html that you are composing and they don't want you embedding some harmful script in the message. So they have a tool pallet to compose the message. You have to find one that supports the full range of markup that you want to use.

[Linda3330]

I use outlook. Linda

[Linda3330]

Thanks for the info. I will try this out and let you know how I do. My husband and I just figured out the absolute address requirement with the images. That works!

[dsch]

@ rjwett: Well, I have two setups of Zen Cart, one on Bluehost and one on my homeserver. HTML mails sent through the home server won't show up correctly, and it's just filled with the html code. HTML mails sent through Bluehost is showing up correctly. I guess it's the server side (PHP installation) then.

@ Linda: rjwett's description is great, here's an additional article about it.