detox — Tue, 22 Jan 2002 13:07:36 +0000

I would say that unless it is vitally important that the recipient views the images, leave them out. What if you simply pointed them to a webpage?

The reason I say this is that at my last job we did something like this and it caused so many headaches it wasn't funny, both for the developers and the recipients......

Wil — Tue, 22 Jan 2002 09:15:24 +0000

I *think* you're going to have problems with the way the mail client connects to the internet to download it's mail. If the user is on a dial up connection, most mail clients (I mean clients here _not_ web based email systems) will fetch your mail from the server and disconnect the connection. This means that it fetches the body of the email - it does not follow the links on your email to download the images from another server. They will then show a broken image icon or nothing at all.

If the user is on a LAN or has his or her's settings differently, then once the mail is downloaded and then viewed the client will lookup the given host and download the images.

The only way I know of getting around this is to embed your images in the email by attaching them to it. This obviously takes more up bandwidth to send/recieve them, but it gives you a greater chance of your postcards being seen.

Busy — Tue, 22 Jan 2002 04:33:41 +0000

When you say text shows up, you mean it shows up in html format, or the html tags show up?

if it displays in html format (html tags dont show) then check the path the images are included by, you'll need the full path ie. http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/image.jpg or whatever, also check the format of the image, not sure if all can view png, tiff or even bmp, so may be easier to keep to jpg and/or gif.

more information

selie — Tue, 22 Jan 2002 03:50:19 +0000

Well actually the text is showing up, its the graphics that are not loading consistantly. Would that be a problem with user preferences as well?

Brian Farkas — Tue, 22 Jan 2002 03:09:03 +0000

I believe it's different for all email clients. Some clients (e.g. outlook) will display graphics in emails, while others may not display HTML email at all. Since it's a user preference whether they want to receive HTML emails or not (and many don't), there isn't really a way to get around it... You might consider sending a text email with a LINK to a postcard that they would click on and the postcard would open in their browser.

Busy — Tue, 22 Jan 2002 02:15:33 +0000

Check your prefences/options, I know yahoo, outlook and hotmail have options to have emails sent (and received) in either text or html formats.

not sure about any "special" coding, but you never know these days, I'm sure someone will be able to tell you, sorry I was no help

I personaly have all receiving emails set to text only, email stationary can clog free accounts (like hotmail) and can take forever to download on slow connections. and then theres those really annoying auto scrolling emails.