What is the deal with HTML email?
Thursday September 25, 2008
I don't have a strong opinion either way about receiving HTML email. Sometimes it's annoying, especially when there are tons of huge images cluttering up what amounts to a message about nothing. And sometimes they are just hard to read when the marketing style of the email gets in the way of the content. And most of the time I don't notice them either way as I have HTML turned off in my email client for security reasons. What I don't understand is why I'm constantly getting requests to teach people how to write HTML email. I have two forms of email that I send out regularly - email from my email client (Gmail, Thunderbird, Yahoo!, or Outlook - whatever) and email from my newsletter. The first I have control over the output, and I can send it as HTML email and format it however I wish using the email client. The second I have no control over the format, and it's sent as HTML by a program. In neither case do I use an HTML editor to write my email - I just write it in the tool and hit send. So I guess the question I'm asking in response to the request that I teach how to write HTML email is this: what do you mean? Don't you know how to use your email client to send formatted email? I just checked and the two email clients that are on this machine both have an "Insert HTML" option when composing email. So I suppose I could write my HTML in a Web editor and then paste it into my email client to send. Is that what you're asking for? If so, what email client do you use? As I'm sure they all do it differently. And for the 39% of you who always send HTML email how do you do it? Do you write email in a Web editor and then send it by importing it into a mail client? Or do you just use the mail client formatting tools directly?
Comments
Well most oh the html email I send only consists of emailing links to people, but I have played around with sending marketing style emails before and I would say the easiest way would be to write the code in your html editor using absolute links to your images on the web, (although I believe most desktop clients will allow you to insert/embed inline images as well) then copy and paste your code (minus any doctype, or skeleton tags) into your email message using your email clients insert html feature. To the best of my knowledge the only way to currently do this is with a desktop client, I don’t know of any web based clients that allow users to insert html directly into a message.
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I assume people would like to add and position graphics in their messages: I was able to create a graphic html message in Google Docs then copy/paste it into a Yahoo! message.
Outlook 97 apparently no longer has an Insert HTML option, and my email client’s HTML capabilities are too limited for me. I don’t use WYSIWYG HTML editors either. I want to create HTML code and then send it in an email. I understand that Thunderbird still allows that.