does anyone code html emails?

[furry_cup]

I am (eventually) re doing my personal online portolio, going to try and set it up like a small business although i intend to to work full time and do work in the eves.

I want to start doing my own html emails to send out to potential customers, email to include txt and images and gif's.

is it much different from normal website coding? if so how?

does anyone do it on here?

thanks

 

[Munday]

I am interested to know this also. I need to send a mail campaign out in a few days!

 

[MattT]

I've just re-done our company one and it's not as straight forward as a website as you've got to cover so many anti-spam filters and mail clients.

http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/templates/

This is a good place to start - not used the service (other than the free trial) but it's pretty decent and quite a lot of free info (do's and don'ts & templates etc)

 

[Andy.]

I have always just made a html page as if you are making a normal webpage. Open the creaeted page in IE, CTRL-A, open up a HTML email (without using word as your editor if you are using Outlook) and paste it into the body.

This does not get around the whole plain text problems that you come across but the emails I sent were all internal so I knew how they would come out the other end.

 

[Adams_16v]

email HTML is a lot different. Table layout is actually better for email html!!

 

[cava83]

not a lot of email editors read CSS propertly, rule of thumb is tables.

 

[Red Cup]

MS have also dragged HTML email back into the last century with Outlook 2007 - it now used Word rather than IE as the rendering engine.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2007/01/microsoft_takes_email_design_b.html

 

[DanS]

general rule with html emails is, they are a pain in the a*se!
most email clients strip out any css in the head, so you have to put any styles in line. as above, tables are the way forward, best rule is, keep them as simple as possible. a lot of clients just strip out a lot of the code so test on as many mail clients as you can before you send to keep formatting as you want it.
then you have the problem that a lot of email clients just show emails as plain text, and html needs to be turned on!
i do them quite a lot at work!

 

[furry_cup]

can you use hotspots? like in dreamweaver?