My organisation wants to send HTML email

How to do this?

[rubenski]

Hi everyone,

The organisation where I work is introducing a new type of member shortly, called "digi-member". We want to send HTML emails to these members instead of a printed newsletter. Some part of these people will not be able to read HTML email, because they use webmail or have HTML email disabled in their email clients.

How would I do something like this?

Should I check in advance whether users want to receive HTML email?

How will webmail programs and non-HTML email clients display my HTML email?

I hope you can share your experiences with sending large amounts of HTML email for a professional organisation.

[lZakl]

This is just what I do, since I’ve never read any HTML mail “how to’s” or “what not to do’s”.

I create an HTML page on our website, originally enough called “monthly_letter.php”. All the links call to the entire site --

ie. <img src=”www.ourdomain.com/images/image.jpg”>

When I am done, then I can copy the HTML into a text file and attach it via PHP and send to everyone within the MYSQL database listed as a ‘subscribed user’. When they get this, either they will be able to view it, or they won’t right? In the case that they can ... cool. In the case that they can’t, I just tell them, if they can’t view the page, and they are interested, go to the website www.ourdomain.com/monthly... where there is a copy of the letter they can read in their browser.

Hope my experience helps you, sorry I can’t tell you whether this is the ‘correct’ way to do this either.

Sorry if there are spelling, or grammatical errors, It’s 4:00 a.m. here and I just got to work :0)

[rocknbil]

Well if it works for you it works for you, but that's the same as designing a site **only** for Internet Explorer. I use a text-only email client and can tell you - especially with WYSIWYG-created "emails" - heavily marked-up emails can definately be illegible and annoying. You might be able to live with the first, but not the second. :-)

There are many ways to do this, but the **right** way I haven't been able to explore. That is you prepare a text-only and an HTML version and email them both in the same stream. Based on the headers and multi-part markers you send, the receiving email client decides which it can read. Sorry to be so sketchy but this is how it is done, I just haven't had time to explore it. Look into the multi-part MIME content type.