[thelist] html in emails/newsletters

[Steve Cook]

I certainly agree with the method below - offering a choice is a good
strategy - if you judge that your target group would be able to make that
choice!

There are ways of doing what you asked about though - sending email with
both HTML and text. We use this for our news mailouts and for mailouts done
by several of our clients and so far (touch wood) haven't had a single
complaint about unwanted HTML email.

To create our mailouts we use the great Jmail component from Dimac
(http://www.dimac.com). I've been using this for years and it is a very
stable, very well supported component. When we create a mail, we add both
HTML content and text content to the mail (using the appropriate methods
from the component - I won't go into details). The mail that is produced
automatically gets a "Content-Type: multipart/alternative;" header which
splits up the content into an HTML version and a text version. I've tested
the mails we send against a whole raft of different mailers that support
differing levels of HTML formatted and text mail and have so far not found
one that doesn't default to text format without the user even being aware of
it.

We tend to avoid sending attached files such as images and instead link them
from our webserver. It means that the mail will display wrongly if browsed
offline, but it avoids the problems of people being suspicious about opening
mails with unknown attachments.

Jmail also hsa a "mailmerge" method, which allows you to run a mail template
against a recordset to insert personalised responses into the newsletters
you send. This requires access to an SMTP server which has a "pickup
directory" to be really effective.

There are other components out there which do pretty much the same thing
however I have not tried them myself. I believe there is even one which
contains its own SMTP pickup service (a directory where your component can
dump properly formatted emails as text files for the SMTP service to send at
its leisure. This avoids the problems of scripts timing out while they wait
for a congested SMTP server to respond!).

I agree that HTML email, handled badly can be irritating to many - one only
has to see the level of reaction that any mention of the subject gets on
this very list ;-) However, handled with respect to the user and with
sensible considerations concerning markup, attachments, formatting of
headers, respect of user's right to unsubscribe etc HTML email can be a
viable method of continuing the identity you have spent so much to create on
your companies website. In my experience, the only users to complain about
HTML formatted email are the extremely technical users (OK - that sounds
like flamebait, but I was in that camp myself for a long time. I also
remember the flame wars over including images in HTML many years back...).
However if  you handle your mail properly so that it defaults to text in
their mailreader you should be in the clear.

Finally, I thought I would present an opposite viewpoint. This is an article
about a study performed by a company I worked with many years ago. They
tested sending HTML email to their clients and the results were interesting
to say the least!
http://www.bluewave.com/about_us/wavelength/mn_wave_natasha_barnett.html

I hope this is useful - it is sometimes difficult to find reliable
information about this subject as so many developers shie away from it. Good
luck!

.steve



-------------------------------------
 Cookstour - http://www.cookstour.org
-------------------------------------

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil
> [mailto:David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil]
> Sent: den 11 september 2002 18:55
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: RE: [thelist] html in emails/newsletters
>
>
> >However, I want the text to appear for those not seeing the
> html, and the
> html to appear for those not seeing the text.
>
> Have two separate lists: newsletter-text at foo.com and
> newsletter-html at foo.com.
>
> When the user subscribes have them specify which list they
> wish to be added
> to.
>
><SNIP>