CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Emily:

You can send HTML messages with images. (ie you can embed images in your html message )

kurund

I love CiviMail, but doesn't this seem kind of an awkward way around things? I have a lot of people on staff who are VERY basic in their computer skills. Is there no way to have the images upload with the HTML file that uploads? It just seems like a long way around to have people first upload images, know those paths, and then have to know html code to embed them in their HTML message....For my org I think this may kill the whole plan of using CiviMail, which is very disappointing as it is seeming so close to perfect.

New feature request?

The basic (and quite solid) point to not allow images (nor any other attachments) in CiviMail is that it’s a tool for mass-mailings, and any attachment basically makes the size of the mailing grow by at least an order of magnitude.

You can always create a sub-page in your CMS of choice and send a link to it; there are also musings on civicrm-dev of hooking existing Drupal nodes as CiviMail mailings, but I see you’re in that discussion already.

I understand (although being a Mutt user, can’t really relate…).

I was going to point you to the CiviMail Attachments thread, but I see you’ve posted there already.

You can open a feature request in our issue tracker for this, but a code contribution would be most welcome.

I would strongly advise against attaching images to your mass mailing. In my experience, any attached images make an email a strong candidate for spam filtering. It's true that posting them separately and linking to them means they won't show up by default in most email readers (who block images by default), but that' s because of the use of images in spam - i.e. there's no good way around this yet.

I'd also strongly advise anyone who does mass mailings to look at any of their existing mass mailings from major companies (i'm sure you're on a few junk lists, yes?). Aside from this issue of images, there are also issues about how html gets interpreted differently on different mail platforms.

And finally - if you're going to try and automated your html civimailings and make them doable by someone who doesn't know html, I think you're making a mistake. Your mass emails are probably more important than your website in terms of drawing traffic and how people perceive you, and it's worth as much to make good mass emails as it is to make a good website in the first place. If you want to be able to send mass emails without any knowledge of html, then just send plain text.

It's very difficult to get out of spam jail and back on to someone's list, easier to avoid getting in jail in the first place and to create content that people actually want and enjoy looking at.