dream weaver mx for dummy - HTML EMAILS

Hi Juliet.

Normally you would use a program like GroupMail to send out HTML newsletter e-mails, and software like this will be able to easily import your HTML files and link to server images easily.

However, you should be able to achieve the result in Outlook too.

First of all, ensure Outlook is set up to compose e-mails in HTML format (Try Tools -> Options -> Mail Format) Rich Text and Plain Text are the other options, but can't include images in those formats.

Secondly, I found un-ticking the 'Use Microsoft Word to edit e-mails' options worked better, as Word HTML can differ greatly to normal HTML.

Now start composing a new e-mail. Copy and paste your HTML from Dreamweaver should work.

For the images, you are right in suggesting you should upload your images to a server. I'd suggest having all the images in their own 'mailout' folder or similar, as other images may change from time to time, but you still want your newsletters to always look the same.

Some options to include the images in your mail are
- To set the source of the images in Dreamweaver to be external eg. instead of src="/asset/image/myimage.jpg" it might be src="http://www.myserver.com/asset/image/mailout/myimage.jpg"
- In Outlook, once you've inserted the HTML, go to each image and go to Insert -> Picture -> and paste the external URL of the image. You might see Outlook connecting to the net to get the image. The image should then appear in your body as normal.

Always test send to yourself first, and I'd also suggest sending to a few different types of e-mail accounts (eg. Hotmail, Gmail and a normal mail client like Outlook) to see if there are any variations of your newsletter across mail client readers.

Hope this helps.

Regards, Rich