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April 09, 2009
[KEEPING IN TOUCH]
Imaging’s five year old grand daughter had a big triumph last week. She won a Little Athletics trophy for Most Improved in her class. And a very impressive object it is. We know that, even though she lives in a Land Far Far Away, because her proud mother sent a photo of the champion and her trophy to all the recipients in our family and friends Yahoo Mail Group.
What’s more the photo was sent as a 10cm by 15cm 200dpi, moderately compressed JPEG, so we were able to print it out and take it straight to the pool room! Well, the fridge door, actually.
Yahoo! Group Mail is an excellent service for keeping in touch with your nearest and dearest. We even get automated reminders of birthday dates on our family group.
First you need a Yahoo! ID and password. Just go to yahoo.com to sign up. Then you create a mail group at tinyurl.com/2auxnn, and you’re away. The recipients on the list first receive a notice from Yahoo! that they have been invited to join the group. They click on the Join Group button and they’re in.
With Yahoo! Group Mail no one except the initiator is forced to join anything or go looking for anybody. The message, with attachments, just turns up in your email inbox like any other electronic billet-doux.
The Yahoo! service has only one small imperfection – it is in a fixed Yahoo corporate style. It lacks the personal touch. For that you need to create your own HTML email – that is, an email that looks like a web page. And that is easy enough.
You will be familiar with those corporate emails we all get from time to time with pictures and neat layout that rise above the normal text-only communications. They are a doddle to make, and once you’ve made one you have a personalised template for all future HTML mails.
Let’s assume that you have dabbled in web page authoring and you have an idea of how it works and perhaps have Microsoft Front Page or Macromedia Dreamweaver installed. There are free, simple HTML email templates on the web. Try these: www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/
Avoid any fancy coding because all email clients behave differently and the simpler you keep it the better the chance of universal readability. Keep all the image and the index files in one folder. Then download the program HTML Email Creator. (www.html-email.net) You can use it ten times without paying. After that it will cost about AUD$39 to register. It is real value for money.
Once the component photos and graphics and the index.html file are in place you run HTML Email Creator and browse to the index file. Setup the emailing service account in Options with the same user name, password and SMTP settings as your regular email client. Type in the addresses of recipients and click on Send Email. It’s a wonderful thing to behold in action.
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Posted by terry at April 9, 2009 12:48 PM
