| Abdul-Wahid Paterson 2005-01-24, 8:58 am |
| Hi,
> It's not hard to do, especially with packages like PEAR's Mail_MIME.
> However, my personal view is that this is a complete waste of bandwidth.
> The files are already available off your site, and most people read mail
> while connected to the internet -- so those images will be available.
While I agree with you in some cases, it does really depend what type
of email you are sending and there are some other factors to take in
to account:
1. If the email is generated particular for this user and is not a
bulk email. The images might be different and thefore you are not
really saving much bandwidth as either way the user is going to get
the image from you.
2. If the images are relatively small, it is not much overhead when
downloading/sending emails.
3. Sites that change content frequently or where users need to
reference back to emails after a few w s (or even months), might
find that the content has changed and therefore non-inline images
don't appear properly.
4. Some email clients don't automatically load images from webservers
as users are worried about increasing their spam. In fact, it is
probably not a good idea to have your email client to download images
automatically if you don't want to attract spam. As such, many emails
with images on the server, may find that the users never actually see
the image. I know this is the case where some companies send me HTML
emails. I never bother downloading the images and they would have done
better sending me text as their emails would be more readable.
> Additionally, image attachments are often a large factor in how
> spam/virus scanners determine whether or not a mail may contain a virus
> or spam (HTML mail is as well, which is why you should send HTML mails
> as multipart/alternative with a text/plain equivalent alternative); why
> risk having your mail quarantined right off the bat?
>
In my experience this is only a problem if you only include HTML and
no text alternative and that you use proper MIME headers. In this
project, I have one set of code and 4 smarty templates: 1. generates
normal HTML for the web, 2. generates a printer friendly page, 3.
generates HTML for an email and 4. generates a text version of the
page.
I then use Pear Mail/MIME to send the emails including the HTML and
text parts. I have not had a problem. I have not had a problem with my
email being classed as spam (and I have been doing this without smarty
for about 3 years with 50,000 users).
Regards,
Abdul-Wahid
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