[scip]

What tools are available for the Mac that allow the creation of HTML email such that I can create email like the Apple eNews, etc.?

How do professionals do this?

[-Q-]

Originally posted by scip:
How do professionals do this?

More than likely, they don't use a Mac to do so. I know I don't. I design everything on my mac and then use a web-based ASP to do that actual sending.

However, the easiest way I've found to do it is this way (requires Entourage):

1. Create HTML in your editor of choice. Make sure all images are hosted on a server; relative links won't work.
2. Open HTML in IE.
3. Open Entourage and address your e-mail to your recipient list. Make sure the new e-mail window is the frontmost window in Entourage.
4. Use this AppleScript to complete the process.

I haven't found a consistent way to use Apple's Mail program to send HTML e-mails but the above method will work for most of what you want to do.

[car1son]

Professionals use nifty and pricy HTML editors, or they just code the HTML directly in a text editor.

Netscape and its open-source kin Mozilla have their own mail clients that allow for composing a reasonable piece of HTML eMail. It's composer tool allows most common HTML functions to be created, and has an escape to enter raw HTML tags if it doesn't have WYSIWYG GUI support.

Apple's Newsletter (and a lot of otehr HTML-formatted newsletters) involves an additional trick: All those graphic images are referenced from the Apple server, not sent in the actual eMail (They get accessed when you view the mail rather than when you receive it.) To do that, you're going to need a web server of some sort (.Mac will certainly do, as will Yahoo! Geocities or whatever website your ISP allows you to set up.)

[Moonray]

HTML email isn't welcome in many places. If you really need to add something fancy better send a pdf as attachement.

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[car1son]

Oh, pooh. HTML is a far more common eMail format than PDF. Large businesses do most of their internal mail in the Outlook subset. I get half a dozen HTML newsletters a day. I don't ever recall getting a newsletter in PDF.

I use all the fancy stuff: bold, italic, a little company logo in my sig, even upper and lower case. I threw out my TTY-33 about 30 years.

Attachments aren't welcome. Opening them is a dangerous habit. I'd never open abulk mail attachment, and I'm not even on a Windows system. I have friends who won't open attachments I send unless they call me on the phone first and make sure it's not the latest virus.

[Moonray]

Seems we have different experiences there. However, I am sure you would get asked to turn your HTML code off if you post to mailing lists, and if an attachment is not executable it is not dangerous.

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[IGrokSpock]

http://www.mailchimp.com/