Tuesday 1 October 2013

Windows Live Mail - inline images: what if you DONT want to embed them?

Outlook Express was a much maligned piece of software, but it had a great feature - it could edit emails in a WYSIWYG fashion, and save them as a plain text >EML file.  This was good news for us techies, because it meant that people that had to create emails for bulk mailing had an editor that was freely available on any XP machine.

In these days of Windows 7 and above, Outlook Express has long gine, and has been replaced with Windows Mail.  It has the same sort of features, but it lacks a major feature of Outlook Express - the ability to send inline references to images, rather than embedding the image in the email.  This ment that the email created was a lovely small size, yet could still look fabulous by referencing images on your external website.

BUT - you can still do it, and here's how...

Firstly, create your email in Windows Mail, and save it as an .EML file.  Then edit this file using a text editor (such as notepad)...  Somewhere in the file, will be the HTML coding section...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content=3D"text/html; charset=3Diso-8859-1" =
http-equiv=3DContent-Type>
<META name=3DGENERATOR content=3D"MSHTML 8.00.6001.19222">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT size=3D2 face=3DArial>testl;aklfsdf</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=3D2 face=3DArial></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=3D2 face=3DArial></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>


Now all you have to do, is place an HTML image link to the image you want to display inline in your email e.g.

<img src=3D"http://www.hypervox.co.uk/wpimages/wpc4053d80_06.png">

The key is the "3D" bit in front of the quotes - Windows Live Mail uses "quoted printable" encoding, which means that "=" is the same as a carriage return - "3D" is the same as "="!