[thelist] HTML email/e-newsletters

Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov
Tue Jun 11 09:39:01 CDT 2002


Unfortunately, most HTML-based e-mail programs (that I've used) try to do
HTML e-mail transparently -- meaning you don't get to see or edit the source
code under most circumstances. I'm sure someone on the list with the same
e-mail client you use (Outlook? -- your message apparently came from an
Exchange server) will be able to help.

If you are writing a program to send out the newsletters, then you need to
modify the "content-type" e-mail header to tell the recipient mail readers
to interpret your message as HTML. Here's a snippet of headers from your
e-mail:

From: "Janet Green" <JGreen at desmoinesmetro.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by leo.evolt.org id
g5BEA84G012698
content-transfer-encoding: 8bit
content-type: text/plain;
 charset=iso-8859-1
Subject: [thelist] HTML email/e-newsletters
Sender: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org

Had your message been HTML e-mail, the header would have read "text/html"
instead of "text/plain," and my mail agent would have rendered your message
as HTML.

--
Jonathan McPherson, LMIT/SD&I
Software Engineer & Web Systems Analyst
email / jonathan_a_mcpherson at rl dot gov

-----Original Message-----
From: Janet Green [mailto:JGreen at desmoinesmetro.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 7:11 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] HTML email/e-newsletters


This relates back to my question the other day about creating links in email
messages. I'd like a brief explanation of (or links to web resources about)
how HTML email works. I receive a couple of fancy-looking HTML-based
e-newsletters everyday, and they look great (they are not attachments - they
look like web pages when I open the message) but when I try to paste HTML
code into a test email and send it to myself, it appears as code instead of
as a web page. Until now I hadn't realized there was something different
about creating an email that looks like a webpage - I thought you just wrote
code and the email program, if capable, interpreted it like a web browser
would do. (In fact, I'm *pretty sure* this used to be the case, because I
remember having to put &gt; and &lt; around snippets of code when I wanted
the actual code to display.) Can someone just clue me in as to some
resources for the basics in doing an HTML-based e-newsletter? Thanks.
Janet



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