Images in E-Mail
I have received several e-mail messages from nonprofit organizations recently where the entire HTML e-mail was nothing but one big jpg image so I thought I’d quickly share a few thoughts/cautions here. These messages happened to look fine with the e-mail client I use to view my e-mail — Outlook 2002. But, if I were using G-Mail or Outlook 2003 I might just get a big red X because the image was blocked. Most people don’t realize how tricky sending e-mail can be. Plus, these messages weren’t very effective because they didn’t contain various text links to areas on the website to take action or learn more.
This article from ClickZ.com is helpful in explaining how images are handled in various e-mail clients and gives some food for thought about how to use images in e-mail. Consider – how would it look without the images?
http://www.clickz.com/experts/em_mkt/opt/article.php/3512571
Be sure to view your e-mail messages with various e-mail clients and browsers before sending them. This is also an area where working with an e-mail vendor can be helpful because they can advise you on what might work in most e-mail programs.
This is a common problem caused by privacy safeguards in modern email clients. Remember the dreaded Web Bug? All these images load from a web server somewhere, potentially allowing the sender to track when and if the email was opened. Spammers use this data to track if the email address is indeed “live”. One way to solve the dilemma is to send the message as a multipart-mixed email (content type multipart/mixed), with a HTML and a text part clearly labeled with the respective MIME types. This way, email clients with HTML mail disabled can show the text part of the message. Providing ALT information for images is very important as well — they are often displayed even though the image may be blocked.