[thelist] Well-formed HTML email

[Pete Prodoehl]

GravyFace wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm constantly plagued with problems with mass-mailing (not spam,
> newsletters :D) HTML messages to various email server/client environments.
> My latest problem is with Mac Panther Mail, which is supposedly using Safari
> for its rendering, a 100% W3C standards compliant browser.
> I also have issues with Lotus Notes and Groupwise.  Outlook seems to work
> fine, regardless of the version. URLs with query strings seem to be getting
> malformed, as well as the body of the messages themselves.
> 
> However, after looking at the header of one of our mailings, I noticed that
> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2600.0" name="GENERATOR"> is inserted by either
> Exchange 2000, my Outlook, or VB's SMTP functions/library (the app the
> mailer was written in, which I don't have the source too).  This might be
> conflicting with the same meta declaration for text/html.
> 
> Any ideas?  I'd love to see some documentation/books on making well-formed,
> standards compliant emails -- you would think that the mail client would be
> like a browser but nothing ceases to amaze me. :)

Well, if you're willing to get your hands dirty using Perl, the 
MIME::Lite module should give you control over everything. You can 
author your HTML email in your editor of choice and then make Perl send 
your email. (I'm assuming other languages might have modules that allow 
similar amounts of control?)


Pete