Lately I have gotten a few requests for a custom email message to go out for various reasons. The folks wanting these emails often want a web page built right inside of the email message that works and acts like a page, complete with features such as images, forms, etc. The first thing I did was to refer them to Jeffery Zeldman’s post on html in email and how it can be more detrimental than useful in forwarding your cause for writing the email in the first place.
When the Media Relations area of my department got a semi-overhaul the new person wanted a simple html template with our logo and a visual cue form our website. Try as I might i simply could not get it to render out in an email client. I messed with settings, code, process, I gave up citing “I don’t know why it wont embed my code”.
After researching a little more I learned that ACC’s mail server “De-Fangs” certain elements in an incoming message. I had seen it before when I pasted straight html code into an email. The mail server searched down certain tags and “de-Fanged” them.
<DEFANGED_IMG xsrc=”http://www.austincc.edu/logo.gif><img>
So now I knew that it was technically impossible to do what I was trying to do. I’m not quite sure which tags the mail server is hunting down but img is definitely one of them.
Often what happens even with email servers that don’t do this is you get 20 attachments to the message of spacer.gif and the like, which is a big turn off to most folks.
So is this a good thing or bad? At first obviously I was frustrated with it because I had to tell my boss we simply couldn’t do it. Then I thought about malicious code being executed inside of email messages without even an attachment being present. This technique may prevent that from happening. What tags does the email server look for? I have no idea, but it does not go after all of them, or else we couldn’t see everyones awesome email signatures so bold and purple. There may be some sort of inline css that I can use to render generated content from inside of the message.
So what to do until then? Write your emails short and sweet, focused block style writing, provide 1 or 2 links, don’t confuse readers with too many links, provide opt in and out if part of a newsletter or listserv, compose in plain text n general keep it simple as possible.
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