CREATING AND SENDING HTML BULKMAIL.
First a warning:
With the increasing amount of spam, both mail servers and individual users are applying tougher and tougher filters to block unsolicited mails. The more images, html and "commercial" you make your mail (e.g. by using stop words like "free", "buy", etc), the greater risk that it will end up in such filters and never be read.
Therefore, if possible, allow people to select if they want html or plain text (ASCII) mails.
With plain text messages, you might want to add a link to a web page looking exactly like the mail you're sending to html recipients.
CREATING the mail
- Create a regular html document in your favorite program, e.g. Dreamweaver,
Frontpage, etc.
- Keep the page as basic as possible.
- Consider a max width of 400 pixels or so. People rarely use a preview pane in their mail client that's as wide as their web browser window.
- If you use CSS, be as plain and basic in that, too.
- Place the CSS code BOTH in the <head> AND
<body> section of the document. Sounds weird, but that's the way to
do it. The reason is e.g. that your formatting will stand a better chance to
actually work when the mail is being viewed in e.g. Hotmail and similar web based
interfaces.
- UPDATE 23 MAY 2007:
I recently made a pretty complicated html mail and tested how it looked in Gmail and Hotmail. Regretfully, I have to admit that the suggestion above about using the styles in both <head> and <body> sections turned out to be insufficient. The CSS was more or less stripped from the mail altogether and the mail looked like....dog vomit....
If you are struggling with problems like e.g. background images or other formatting that won't propagate through to the webmail interface, you will need to either add the styles inline and/or even fall back to good old html3.2 or 4.01 and add the formatting attributes within the respective tags.
Example inline style in a table cell:
<td style="background:#ccc url(http://mysite.com/myimage.jpg) repeat">
Example good old html formatting of the same:
<td background="http://mysite.com/myimage.jpg" bgcolor="#CCCCCC">
By the inline and/or old html technique, it seems as if most formatting will propagate into various webmail programs too, in addition to regular mail clients. After a bit of tweaking and bending, the mail looked exactly the same in Gmail as in a regular mail client (save for the a:hover that I never made work i the webmail).
However, while Gmail allows images to show, it seems as if Hotmail doesn't. I didn't find any switch or lever to allow them to download. So there, the mail look crabby anyway...
- When done, upload the images you're using to a remote server, e.g. where you keep your own website.
- Change the links in the doc accordingly, i.e. from <img src="image.jpg"> to <img src="http://www.mysite.com/image.jpg">
SENDING the mail
Sending the mail with Outlook Express on Windows, see here.
There are also several designated bulk mail applications. Make a Google or look e.g. here.
Sending the mail with Entourage on Mac:
- You need to save the doc with exactly the subject you want on the mail, i.e. not "my-email.html" but rather "Send us your money - now!" without any "html" or "htm" extension at all.
This will make it "invisible" to Dreamweaver's Design view, but you can always change the file name after you're done in DW or keep two copies of the doc. It'll also be visible in DW again as soon as you make a small change.
- Go here and get "Send complex html E 1.1" if you're on Mac OS 9 or "Send complex html X 2.0.1" if you're on Mac OS X. Place the scripts in folder for Entourage's scripts and restart the program.
- Open a new message, select the script from the top menu and follow the instructions.
For Mac, there are also some designated bulk mailers, e.g. here.
Sending the mail using external help:
People have recommended MailChimp.
I haven't any personal experience from them, but have read positive referrals
from other users. Probably well worth trying.
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