I was wondering if anybody could recommend a good site/resource regarding developing HTML emails... even from source code. Are there particular mail clients designed for this? Can I develop a layout in dreamweaver and then populate it into an email? I would prefer to do this without interaction with Microsoft products because I do not understand its source code...
On an alternative not can anybody direct me to a site that explains the tags that Microsoft outlook uses for its HTML emails and the compatibility that outlook and other clients have to different forms of HTML?
Thanks!
HTML e-mail is just like any other html documents. the composer will create it as it like, and the client will render it as it want. that is why you will get different layout if you open it in outlook and thunderbird.
It really depends on what you are using to send emails. Most of the web interfaces for the major providers don't do pure HTML editing... Outlook and Thunderbird might. Usually, you can use Outlook to make HTML emails, but you're not using the tags themselves - just using an interface that is similar to Word, it puts the tags in behind the scenes for you.
Be careful about writing HTML emails though - some providers don't like it, and most listservs and reflectors that I've used will parse things incorrectly, leading to a blank or unreadable message.
So Thunderbird is a recommended application for composing in? I have not used it yet so I will have a play around latter. Thanks for the info.
| t1mmclaren wrote: |
| I was wondering if anybody could recommend a good site/resource regarding developing HTML emails... even from source code. |
No, but I can thoroughly recommend using text-only emails. HTML emails are considered quite rude because (a) they can be up to ten times the size of the equivalent text-only mail and (b) they can hide malware/viruses/etc much more easily. So don't use them. You can express yourself just as well in plain-text anyway, using established codes - ie *bold* _emphasis_ (like italic or underline) etc etc.That's exactly why I use plain-text for almost ALL my emails. It saves space on the server, and, believe it or not, there are still some people who get their mail over dialup. HTML looks pretty for some things, and is great for important stuff, but for the everyday, go for plain text. It gets the job done.
