#30: Creating and Sending HTML Email
Designing HTML Email is far cry from regular web design. Sure, they both us HTML elements, but the whole philosophy is different. In this world, you gotta do all you can do to make sure this single design is as viewable as absolutely possible in all email clients, and there are a heck of a lot more email clients than their are browsers. HTML Emails are all about table based layouts, inline styling, and direct URL’s. Codin’ like it’s 1999.
Running time: 28 minutes
Direct Download: High Quality, Quicktime .M4V Format (AppleTV Ready)
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Great video. Just the right explanation for the subject. I have one last question about the sending. Do you send the email newsletter to yourself from Thunderbird, then open it within G-Mail and send it to your mailing list? Or do you do the sending from within Thunderbird?
thanks very helpful video.
Petra again: I found out how to easily send the HTML mail to a google mail mailing list.
1) I created the HTML mail as described in the video with Thunderbird
2) I send it to myself so it lands in my google mail account
3) I open it there (in the browser) and hit “forward”
4) I erase the little block of text starting with “Forwarding….”
5) I click into the BCC field and type the first letter of the name of my mailing list
6) Google pops the email addresses of that group into the BCC field
7) I add my own emal address in the “to” field, so I get it myself and can see what it looks like
8) I send the mail, wich now looks as if created by a professional mailer programm and not created by me in Thunderbaird and then fowarded to google and then send again from there
You are a genius.. Thank you for your help.
Fantastic. Perfect. I can’t say enough to thank you for posting this effort for free.
Thankyou so much, a great help. Can I create a default template that a client can edit in a wysisyg? If so which are my options?
cheers
Just wondering what the thoughts are on if this whole html email thing is a good idea or not? Just googling the words “html email” will yield sites that propose that html formatted email is a bad idea. I am sure if you had a group that was aware of who you are etc its not that big of deal.
But say you were announcing a new service to a list of 100 strangers: is html email going to be a good thing for you or not?
Thanks,
Max
This is a great article.
I use a Mac and did not want to use yet another mail client. There is a way to use Apple Mail’s “stationery” system though…
Once you have your html email template in perfect shape then open it in Safari. Use a “Command I” to open the file in Apple Mail. Make sure the “from”, “to”, and “subject” fields are empty and then go to File, then Save as Stationery. Then give file template a name and it will appear as a Custom Stationery option when you create a new mail…
I found this avoids having to download Thunderbird and then have Thunderbird downloading all my emails when all I really want is a way of sending html email. So far it works pretty well. I did find that some Windows mobile phones did you display everything correctly though, but that might be some other issue than the mail coming from Apple Mail.