email mailing list / html problem.

[DiscoStu]

My girlfriend uses a Yahoo email account for her business emails. She now has a huge list of customers she would like to email newsletters to. But we can't seem to work out how!

Where should we create the mailing list? In Excel? She has linked her Yahoo account to Outlook Express, but can't get anything to send.

The other thing is that she wants to create an html email, with graphics, but this is another source of confusion! She has made it in Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook Express but can't get it to send.

HOW DOES EVERYONE ELSE DO IT??

[Thunderchild]

well html is not like word or exel u need to create it in word and save as html. the easiest way to send an email to lots of people is to putt all their names in the CC feild more than that i cannot suggest. u could try the http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/ as there there r lots of experts not wanting to down the AB but somethings r just out of depths here.

[Ralph]

I agree with Thunderchild, waaay over my head, not something I've needed to do before. However, I will say that when you finally get it sussed, you put all of your customers addresses in the BCC field (blind carbon copy) and put yourself in the "To" field. That way, Tom won't know that Dick and Harry are customers of yours and you won't be giving your mailing list to one of your competitors or a spammer.

[salty777]

I had to work out how to do this, and it was rather involved.

The advice I found was that you have to create the email as a .html page and then publish that page up on to the internet (eg using your free web space with Yahoo). It's only once it's on the Internet that you can then use Internet Explorer's File - Send as Page command, which puts the page contents into an email. (Until it's on t'Internet, choosing this command just creates a link I seem to recall).

However, it might be even more involved yet. I create the web page in Dreamweaver (great but expensive), which means that images aren't inserted into the web page as such, just links and placeholders for those images. So when the email arrives in people's inboxes, the links are broken (because they're relative links, not absolute). Anyway, I found some advice that led me to use Find / Replace on the code source to change the URLs to absolute. In other words, you create fixed links to the images that you leave in your web space.

However, perhaps this won't be an issue in Word; maybe it actually embeds the images in the page. (In which case, use images sparingly or dial-up people might get cross at the time it takes to download).

In short, try creating a page in Word, publishing it to some web space, and then seeing if you do a File - Send as Page whether other people still receive the images. If it doesn't work, I suspect you'd be best buying an email newsletter tool. (You get a free online newsletter tool if you have webspace with 1&1 - oneandone.co.uk)

For your info, I keep the email addresses in Excel, just for ease of then copying and pasting the entire column into Outlook's BCC field (View - BCC). 

On the BCC front: I recently wasn't paying full attention and TO'd everyone in my mailing list instead. Needless to say some people were less than happy with me for revealing their email addresses to several hundred others!