How do I send a bulk email with HTML and graphics?

James,

Sending out bulk email is not the most difficult of things to do, but it does come with some pitfalls as you've already started to discover.

Pitfall #1 - Graphics
There are two options available here: 1) Embed the graphics in the email which will end up making each email message a larger file size, or 2) Host the images on a remote server. This keeps the file size of the mail message small, but depending on the number of emails previewed/read, will raise the demand a bit on the server hosting the images.

Pitfall #2 - CSS Styles
You will have to define all your styles inline because most mail clients will not allow you to reference a remote style sheet. Not a big deal, but if you get style happy, you will end up increasing the file size of each email being sent out.

Pitfall #3 - HTML/Text body
Make sure that you create the emails with a text-only alternate for those folks that have turned off HTML emails (an option in MS Outlook and other email clients) or those clients that don't support HTML email.

Pitfall #4 - Email message is one big graphic
This can be a tempting one - make a pretty layout in Photoshop and turn it into one big graphic that's embedded in the message. This is bad because there are a lot of spam filters the will reject image only email messages.

Pitfall #5 - Massive BCC field length
You can either send a single message to a single recipient, or do what a good number of the "spammers" are doing out there which is sending a message to a huge number of recipient addresses in the BCC field. Some of the human-based spam filters are starting to pick up on this one and will flag a message as spam if it contains more than "x" number of BCC recipients. I design my systems to send a single message to a single recipient, but most of my emails are custom-tailored to the recipient, so sending massing BCC messages wouldn't work for my clients.

I know in your question you said that you had a company "backing you up"...I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that statement. Will they be doing the "heavy lifting" of creating the actual mail message and sending?

I've done several subscription-based bulk email systems - some of them sending over 6000 messages each day. If you need some help, look me up online at www.castagna.net.

How do I set up a text alternate? Is that coded? I set up the HTML for it and I learned the hard way that CSS doesnt exactly work so already converted that into inline CSS. Also, is there any way to send it without the BCC? There will be a couple thousand of recipients but they are all current clients of ours. The user doesnt get to see that it is "To" them when I BCC it.

Thanks, you're a great help.

James,

Are you doing all the programming for this, or "just" the HTML side? The reason I'm asking is because the text/alternate depends on what you're using for a server solution.

The text alternate is basically all the content you have on the page with proper carriage return/line feeds between them. It is manually (or in some of my apps generated on the fly) created and added to the message.

The MailMessage object in .NET, as well as third-party controls like AspEmail allow for you to set both the body of the message (HTML) and the alternate body (TEXT) but they're set programmatically. This creates the multipart message for the mail server to handle properly.

Your question on BCC is exactly what I do with most of my systems. They do not send anything out BCC, every message is "addressed" to someone specifically. What I do is get a recordset of the people that will get the email and do a loop through this recordset and create a message for each address listed. The address goes in the "TO" field for each message.

I appreciate the compliment very much. Thank you.

I've got about a dozen custom bulk email systems out there in the wild for my clients. If you find yourself too jammed up, let me know. I do offer independent consulting services and I'm certain I could help you out.

I'm just doing the HTML side but we do have ASP programmers that work with us. I know my company has sent out bulk emails before also but I just wanted to handle as much of this as I could myself for both my own learning purposes and to save time of other resources within the company. If it requires programming, probably gonna let them handle that since we do it for clients anyway.

I think you've done as much as you can from the HTML side...the only other thing you could do is provide the text alternate to the programmers as a .txt file (notepad, etc) with the "layout" of that document...

One of my text alternates looks like:

Message of the Day:
----------------------------------------------------
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

In this issue:
Jack the Ripper found alive
Easter Bunny fills in for Santa Claus

Jack the Ripper found alive
-----------------------------------------------------------
In a startling turn of events, Scotland Yard has determined that a previously unidentified man living in the tubes is actually Jack the Ripper.


Easter Bunny fills in for Santa Claus
-----------------------------------------------------------
blah, blah, blah...

I think you can see where I'm going. Obviously, the text portion won't be as "pretty" to read but can still convey the text of the HTML message.

Another thing I have done, but it's a maintenance nightmare, is to post a link in the text alternate that will send the recipient to an HTML page on the server...since you already have the .html file for the email message, you can save it to a directory on your server. The maintenance headache comes in with maintaining the links to make sure that the email sent today doesn't have the link in the text to yesterday's message, etc.

But, at least the reader would have the option of seeing the "pretty" version.