Standardizing email

I've done several email campaigns. It can be tricky. Not everyone has HTML email either, so you may want to think about creating a plain text version and a HTML version and let the mail application decide which by declaring that in the header.

Yes, you will use absolute urls on a hosted server. There are a lot of things that do not work in email that do in HTML such as background images, so keep that in mind.

You will only be flagged as spam if you are sending this to someone who does not want to receive it. Make sure the domain/IP you are sending from isn't black listed. Also, depending on your list size, you may want to think about using an application which will send emails in "bursts". For example, if yahoo gets 15k request all at once, it thinks something is fishy and may possibly deny your request, so using burst you can send say 5 emails per second. But that is for big lists.

Past that, theres not much you can do to not get dumped into a bulk folder.

i like to embed the images in the message, so when they open the email its there right away, not waiting to pull in.

ChicoWeb said:

You will only be flagged as spam if you are sending this to someone who does not want to receive it.

Click to expand...

Careful, there. Alot of people use SpamAssassin and ProcMail filters on the server which check the message headers, body and complex rulesets that often flag spam. Sometimes the rules include excessive graphics in the message body, i.e. adware. So aside from white hatting the IP/domain, send out a few tests before the client sees it since it seems like the client wants fancy HTMLified emails sans attachments. Make sure their mail system doesn't reject HTML.


The content type header should be set to "text/html" via your script and simply design the E-mail as HTML with images inline and pointing to your web server. Some clients automatically insert images into the body even if you send as an attachment, but sounds like this client doesn't want to be bothered with checking his own mail client setting so sending HTML is the only way YOU control the mail format.

I like the advice offered to send both text/plain and text/html, btw. This is the best overall solution.

-jim

Hey digging up this old thread,

What's the best way to send HTML mail? Hopefully it's not "Mail Contents of This Page".

I have been using ThunderBird with an EditSource extention, but even that attaches the images rather than linking to the actual http://www address that we have on our public servers.

Found out that Windows Mail has it