Concept

(c) [werk01.de]
Upon sending or receiving emails a complicated set of protocols and standards guarantees that the email will be send from one sender to the recipient(s). Most email applications hide these interactions by offering a userfriendly interface more common to the users needs to access, read and create emails.

Historically built entirely out of ASCII codes (a small subset of the characters we use i.e. in text applications) the email applications provide further character encoding translations or layout capabilities. In order to send this information properly the email clients must encode the additional data according to the MIME encoding standard. One of the latest extensions to this standard is the definition of parts and encodings schemes to send binary data (needed for the encoding of the images) and a HTML page itself.

Focused on email management, most email applications have limited (if any) layout features such as GoLive. On the other hand GoLive lacks the encoding capabilities and fails to provide an interface to manage and read emails properly.

This extensions builds a bridge: you can design your page in GoLive, add images, tables and other layout elements to a HTML page. HTML2EMail can then encode the HTML page and the embedded image data, generate the body of an email and send the email.

Because HTML enriched emails are often (mis-)used for mass-processing, further considerations have to be taken into account in order not to be registered or perceived as a spammer and be blocked by some service providers:

  • always use opt-in services first
  • always allow the receiver to be removed from your sender list either by embedding a proper HTML link or by providing a functional sender email address
  • embedding javascript or plugins is most likely to break because only a few email clients can process these objects
  • some recipients cannot display or have by intention switched off HTML enriched emails anyway
  • further rules/netiquettes should be respected in their approriate context