[thelist] HTML Email

[Matthew McLeod]

Hi - new evolt member here - just to say re: the HTML email saga - the
solution is simple - I think it was mentioned in a past post, not an entire
solution tho...

Most ppl don't like sitting thru a d/l of an email thats ~20k (text msg +
html msg) to only get 1k worth of text - some ppl out there are still on
limited bandwidth :)

The most elegant solution that I found did involve an image tag - however
not to a literal image. I'm an asp coder - there are teqniques for vbscript
(I'm not to sure about other scripting languages) that enable a page to
masquerade as an image..

The trick simply involves code like the following in the email (typically a
user signup response/password email) -

<img
src='http://yourdomain.com/somedir/emailver.asp?confirmationcode=65784323854
0 alt='Your email address has been verified!'>

This piece of code access a page which reads the querystring - takes the
confirmation value and checks your DB for that confirmation code - activates
the account and registers the fact that they recieve html email. This means
the client/borwser doesn't need to come back to the site and enter auth
codes or anything. Of course in the plain text of the msg you include a link
that will take them to a page(one that doesn't masquerade as an img!) which
will perform the same functionality.

http://vai.aaarf.com/evolt/emailconf.txt <--- for some vbscript code to
masquerade as an img
http://vai.aaarf.com/evolt/evaluate.func <--- for some decent vbs email
validation & tons of other functions.