[thelist] Email Newsletter Graphics

[Daniel J. Cody]

Hershel Robinson wrote:

> I am also working on a project involving emailing graphics.  Why do you
> recommend to link the images to the server?  I can think of two reasons not
> to:
> 
> 1 Reduce number of hits on the server.  (OK, this may not be a big concern,
> but if there is a lot of mail going out...)


Couple scenerios: Lets say you do send out the images with the message. 
You save your webserver from getting the image hits, but your email 
server has to deal with X times more load. Instead of it sending out 
your HTML formatted email with links to the webserver that weighs in at 
10K, its now sending out the HTML formatted email with images attached - 
each of which is now around 50K. If you're sending out only 1000 emails, 
you've just increased the amount of data your mailserver has to move by 
~40Mb.. You're trying to put down ~50Mb of data down your internet 
connection all at once(or as fast as your email server can go), and it 
becomes the bottleneck.. Now thats not a *lot*, but think of 10,000 
emails :)

On the flip side, if you send out the emails with images linked to a 
webserver, the 40Mb will still get pushed through your internet 
connection, it just won't all be at once. One would assume that those 
1000 people read their email at different times of the day(or week) 
thereby spreading out the demand for bandwidth.

One more thing, linking images to the server is a nice way to track 
email newsletter usage. If you're sending out a newsletter about Bingo's 
Birthday Bash, a nice way to see if people even give a flyin !@#! about 
Bingo's Birthday is to drop the images you're linking in a seperate 
directory and link them like so: http://www.whatever.com/bingo/some.gif

That way you can run logs and see how many times the images in the 
/bingo directory were accessed, maybe giving you an idea of how 
effective your email newsletter is and if anyone really cares about 
Bingo's Birthday at all :)


> 2 What if the user is viewing his mail offline?  Many users make a point of
> downloading their mail, hanging up the modem to conserve their monthly ISP
> allotment (or to make a phone call!), and then reading the mail and
> composing replies offline.


Ya, this is a very good point.. I guess it depends on the type of 
newsletter one is sending out. I would imagine that the HTML newsletter 
would convey some information other than the pictures. Hopefully some 
text is included and the user can get a general idea of what you're 
trying to get accross.


> I can think of one reason why it is better to link to the server: It's a lot
> easier!  I tried to write MIME code to include a graphic file and after a
> few hours of no success, I gave it up for the time being.  I am still


oy! tell me about it :) Most anyone can compose HTML emails if they 
choose to do so.. When you start talking MIME, eyes tend to glaze over 
for most :)


> considering going back and trying to make it work.  Unless, of course,
> someone can convince me that linking to the server is actually better.

I'm not saying my way is better or anything, just the way I tend to do 
things.. Which are ususally better ;)

.djc.