Enewsletters sent from Outlook 2007?
March 8th 2010
In our company, I make copy for multiple newsletters and my coworker, the web designer, uses Dreamweaver to make the template and copy/paste the copy into it.
There’s always some excuse.
Outlook isn’t recongizing the code.
The coding is just wrong.
There’s nothing he can do because we send it through Outlook.
Blah blah blah.
I’ve come to the point where I’m sick of the excuses.
Is he right – is there a problem with sending them through Outlook? How do other companies send out eNewsletters?
If I hear that the links to the newsletter articles can’t work because of a coding error one more time, I’m going to blow a gasket.
March 9th, 2010 at 11:02 pm
I’m not really clear on what your issue is. But I’ll give it a shot.
OK Dreamweaver should easily create you a newsletter. Then you would, theoretically, save the newsletter file as an HTML file. Then, using outlook, you can insert this file. But the kicker might be that you have to insert this file as a text into outlook email, rather than insert it as html, in order to get it to format correctly.
Hope this helps.
March 11th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Outlook 2007 is different as it uses Word to interpret the HTML code – previous versions of Outlook used Explorer.
However, all is not lost. Your IT person just needs to be careful with the code that is used. No external style sheets for example. The styles should be what’s referred to as in-line CSS. In fact I have had more success with using the redundant tag!
Other things to bear in mind is that things like forms in your email won’t work in Outlook 2007, background images can be a problem too.
I use Dreamweaver to make html newsletters and my clients use Outlook 2007. I will admit the rendering is not as perfect as previous versions of Outlook, but it is possible. There are some webmail clients that don’t like the styling Word adds to the html. Word adds it own version of html to the document which some webmail programs find difficult to interpret.
In the source area is a link your Web person might be interested in reading, so the two of you can find a happy medium between html and Outlook.
Good luck