How do I send email as HTML?

[Derringer]

I'm setting up a newsletter for a little group I have and was wondering how you can send an HTML formatted email. The only option it seems is to attach it, but I feel it's really unprofessional and inconvenient for the recepients to have to go through several right clicks. I mean, the spam that people receive for porn sites is in html, and it doesn't come as an attachment so, why should my legitimate newsletter not be able to do the same?

[Grizzly]

I think you're probably failing to send the appropriate mail-headers along with the HTML content. By what means are you trying to send this e-mail? Through a script? If so, in what language is it written?

[gameboy1234]

If you mean typing it in, then there's a little button on most email clients that usually say something like "Rich Text" or "Formatted" that you press.

If you mean do-it-yourself, as in writing a PERL script to send out email, then you have to set the Content-Type in the headers of the email to "text/html". To get graphics, not sure, but I think it's Content-Type: multipart-related; then define each of the sections appropriately (with the first as Content-Type: text/html.)

You might just send a rich text email to yourself from you email client, then look at the headers to see how they do it.

[Bearded Kirklander]

Since so many people have HTML viewing turned of nowadays, I use Adobe Acrobat and either embed the fonts or use only Arial and/or Times New Roman. An external PDF file can be easily viewed, printed, saved and archived. Might be worth a try.

Or, do the newsletter in Microsoft Word, save as a web page and cut and paste the code. Or maybe you could try doing a Send To Email Recipient.

[Derringer]

Well it works if I send it to my pop3 account via outlook express, but for Yahoo, gmail, or hotmail, the background and some images come as separate attachments.

[Bearded Kirklander]

Originally posted by Derringer
Well it works if I send it to my pop3 account via outlook express, but for Yahoo, gmail, or hotmail, the background and some images come as separate attachments.

Sounds about right. They may be stripping them out for safety reasons. I don't view HTML messages in my Outlook Express 6. Have it turned off. They do strange things with HTML, JPG's and other stuff in them pages. I'm so glad they added a View all messages as Plain Text option in one of the OE 6 updates.

[gameboy1234]

Originally posted by Derringer
Well it works if I send it to my pop3 account via outlook express, but for Yahoo, gmail, or hotmail, the background and some images come as separate attachments.

Again, try sending a message from say Outlook to Hotmail. Can you see the jpegs? If so, then forward it back to yourself, and check out how they do it. I just might be some small syntax in the email message itself that's causing the issue. Ditto for yahoo, gmail, etc. Find a message that works and forward it to yourself, see what is different about the message.

EDIT: just FYI, I get newletters from Codemasters that show up fine on hotmail, maybe get on the codemaster list and see if you can see what the difference is between email formats. Just an idea...