Formatting Newsletters in Blue Zinfandel 6.0

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amyk's picture

Hi everyone,

I'm really new to this and have had a lot of help setting up a site for a project I run out of the Pacific Cinematheque. I've been having a really hard time sending out my first newsletter. I've spent hours working on formatting it and then I send out a test and it arrives full of html code, with no formatting, and no photos.

I've checked the most obvious settings, like making sure it's set to html rather then plain text- but I don't know enough about the program to dig any deeper.

Any suggestions?

amy

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plaintxtreceivedinmacmail.jpg70.88 KB
plaintxtnewsletterreceivedingmail.jpg225.93 KB

Comments

Welcome to hell...

DeeZone's picture

Amy,

Sadly the inconsistency of browsers rendering HTML is excellent relative to the results of HTML rendered in email applications. Can you tell us what your test bed (what email application) you're using to review your news letter proofs in. There are a few tools that might help the process but the bottom line is you need to keep the layout very, very simple.

D.

This was the subject of

rjdempsey's picture

This was the subject of Vancouver League of Drupaliers meeting we had a while back. Monique Trottier spoke about some of the gotchas in email newsletters. Dale recorded the talk and posted it on his blog. You may find it helpful. http://www.group42.ca/email_newsletters_and_the_simplenews_module

Wow!

DeeZone's picture

Wow!! Super interesting, thanks!

I've attached some screen

amyk's picture

I've attached some screen grabs of the newsletter received in macmail and gmail to give you a better idea of what i'm talking about. I'm going to read that blog post this afternoon.

Campaign Monitor

baronmunchowsen's picture

Hi there, not sure if this is of assistance to you, but we use Campaign Monitor for all our e-mail newsletters. It's pretty bomber. There is a drupal module for it too: http://drupal.org/project/campaignmonitor which allows you to manage your subscriber lists through your drupal website.

In my very limited experience of coding e-mail newsletters, I've always had to code the e-mail html from scratch, using basic table layouts and inline styles. If memory serves Monique goes into this in her presentation and also lists off some resources you can use to check what html is valid/accepted across certain e-mail clients. It was a great presentation and well worth the watch.

MailChimp better than Campaign Monitor

Vancouver

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