Forum Moderators: open
I am working on a email campaign where some recipients of the email (lotus notes users)cannot view the images even though they are loaded on a webserver.
The HTML file was created in dreamweaver. I submit the HTML file along with it's text equvalent via a third party company who merges my data with the files.
My question is, is there any way that I can embed the images into the HTML file so that they appear no matter what the recipient's end settings?
I know that this is probably a no go (spam, mail size etc.) but the client I am doing the campaign for is reluctant to approve it when they can't see the images even though I and other mail users can.
Thanks for your help!
Your problem is two-fold. Maybe three. I dunno, I'm not good at folding.
Firstly, Lotus Notes users are primarily corporate users, which means it's very likely they have images blocked by default. Even if you could successfully embed an image for Lotus to read, it wouldn't work in that scenario.
My success in sending HTML emails has come from first-hand experience, and as I've never had first-hand experience with Lotus Notes, I don't know what to tell you. One trick that supposedly works for CSS styles may also work for the images- commenting out the code. For instance (and again, I've never tried this because I just admit defeat with Lotus Notes), while Lotus Notes has big problems displaying CSS, if you were to attempt
<!-- .message {line-height: 1.6em; color: red} -->
The word on the street is Lotus Notes will read it. Maybe try that with an image?
<!-- <img src="http://absolute.path.com/example.jpg"> -->
On a related topic, I think you might find that building an HTML email in Dreamweaver is going to cause you a lot of problems... if you're only sending to Lotus Notes users, then you already have a slew of proprietary issues to try to overcome... but to send to Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL accounts, I highly suggest hand-coding the page. I put up an article a while back about sending HTML email... it's a bit dated as I've figured some things out since then, but i'll see if I can find it.
Good Luck
edit: Found the thread. Message #7.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Some things I forgot to mention/just realized/have been taught since that thread:
1. If you embed your CSS somewhere inside the <body> instead of before it, your styles stand a much better chance of rendering.
2. I forgot to mention/assumed people knew: some apps (namely AOL) will simply slaughter your HTML email if you don't put a content-type meta tag in, i.e. "<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">"
3. In the article, I think I said something about basic CSS layout being doable in HTML emails. It ain't. I think my mind was wandering when I typed that originally.
