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How and where to place - css, html and images in email to make it a HTML email?

I have seen many advertising emails in my inbox and I am curious to know how does the email body display the HTML.

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closed as off topic by John Conde♦ Oct 20 '12 at 14:07

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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Take a look at

  1. The article HTML email on wikipedia. It's a nice summary.
  2. Your mail software will have the option to view your mail in raw format so you can a have a look.

If you are even more curious (and have minimal developer skills) take a look at libraries like PHPMailer to see how HTML mails can be built.

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up vote 2 down vote

Images you must hot link to, CSS will be inline styled. Few styles are rendered by email clients such as gmail yahoo aol outlook etc. Make sure to use tables and not pure CSS columns etc.

I would look at MailChimps knowledge base which have great articles on this http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-to-code-html-emails

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"Images you must hot link to": This is the best solution for various reasons (tracking, saving costs if you have to pay, changing it later, ...) - but it is a recommendation, not absolute. You can also embedd/attach them. There are use cases where this approach is better. – initall Oct 20 '12 at 12:50
I rarely see embedded images almost everyone hot links and stores the images on their own server IMHO – Anagio Oct 20 '12 at 13:03
You gave the impression, even without further details that "images must be hot linked to". As I commented, this is not required by a standard. Most of the time it's the better solution, though. – initall Oct 21 '12 at 11:16

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