Wayne, I have an application that sends emails to users based on different events occurring, (i.e. member sign up, order confirmation, special announcements, joining of a mailing list,etc) in the users profile I have the users answer his/her preferred way of receiving email (plain text, HTML) so in my db I keep two separate TEXT fields (using mysql) one to store the text version and one to store the html version. This flag is included in the sql that fetches the list of users that are to receive email and then I loop over them plain text first and then html users. data analysis on the user profile table shows that only 36% of the users prefer html. So that in mind I went through the same mental exercise that you are: sending a "self-contained" html email with graphics "embedded" into the email, not served from my servers. After much experimentation my findings was that it was not practical and only possible if the user accepting the email would except attachments and was instructed to dump them to a directory of the host machine and then I would use a direct <img src=C:\newsletterimagedirectory\image.ext> but most users aren't that bright and the only way then was to attach and write a .bat file to create the directory but most folks know better then to open a .bat file in email. So given these facts and the fact that we were only concerned about a little more than a third of the registered users I decided to turn my energies in another direction. I serve all the images from a virtual directory on my server that does not allow directory browsing and I've placed an index.html file in that directory that will redirect a user to the site home page for each mailing I create a new sub directory containing that mailings images. I can then use the iis logs to determine how many times each directory was accessed and it gives me statistics that I can put in front of my client to show the number of accesses to the directory compared to the number of HTML mailings sent. If the number of accesses is lower than the number of mailings sent, you can bet the email was never read, if the number of accesses is greater then the number of HTML emails sent well then you know every body read it and some more than once. I've been wanting to write some reports that do these comparisons of the data in the iis log and the data in the sites db but have found little appetite for my client to fund the development of a report for this given that they use WebTrends and can see the directory hits from there. I have another client that I pitched this same idea to but they wanted to send a link via email and serve dynamic, personalized pages so all access was logged and tracked in the db this is much more efficient in targeting your mailings to those that follow the links in the email. I cannot unfortunately share these taf's because they were "work for hire" and although I retain authorship I do not own them. csmith
----- Original Message ----- From: "Wayne Irvine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Multiple recipients of list witango-talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 6:25 PM Subject: Witango-Talk: Images in HTML emails > We are doing a project to send out monthly newsletters to subscribed members > of a club. > > We use Tango 2000's Mail Action and select HTML as the format. We can include <img src=.... References to graphics on our servers, but would > prefer to send out the images with the email. > > We attach the images no problem, but then have no idea how to reference them > in the HTML of the email. > > Is this possible? If so, how? > > Any help would be appreciated. > > Wayne Irvine > > Byte Services Pty Ltd > http://www.byteserve.com.au/ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Ph 02 9960 6099 Mob 0409 960 609 Fax 02 9960 6088 > > ________________________________________________________________________ > TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text/US ASCII email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with unsubscribe witango-talk in the message body ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text/US ASCII email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe witango-talk in the message body
