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Does anyone know how HTML formatted emails are created?
Not just the text ones but the ones with graphics and image maps, hyperlinks on graphics, tables, text etc just like a web page.
Is there an easy way of doing it?

The message is just a multipart mime message. You specify the content type in a header field (I think it's "multipart/mime", but I'd have to check to be sure) and the HTML message body is one of the parts. From there, you can either refer to images on the web or you can include the images as attachments and refer to them. I'm not sure of the syntax for the latter; view the source of an example message to see the syntax.

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Do you know how to do this in practice? Can it be done in Outlook Express for example? I've tried everything I can see in the menu's and still can't achieve it.
How do you specify the content type, and get the html in the message without it just appearing as code?
Any help or url of a tutorial/faq would be greatly appreciated.

My bad. You asked the question in the Developer forum and I thought you were asking from a different point of view.

To my knowledge, OE doesn't let you generate email messages with an arbitrary HTML body. You can do the equivalent of RTF, but you can't do tables or images or whatnot like the Amazon marketing blurb that just showed up in my mailbox. Come to think of it, I'm not aware of a client that will let you do that.

When I've done rich HTML messages, I've done them from a scripting point of view where I generated the message line by line, generating what you see when you view the source of the message. Is this the sort of thing you're looking for, or are you just looking for a mail client that will let you send messages?

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I'm looking for a way to send inline images with hyperlinks embedded. I can code html, but can't do anything more complicated. When I did a search for an app. or faq. on how to do it, every result was to do with .asp or.php.
Is this the only way to do it?

It's the most common way.

Which version of the OS are you using?

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9.1 but soon going to add os x, just for fun.

Why does everyone use .asp and .php for such a task?