3 ms·
It seems I omitted the well known problem with HTML-only emails. There are commonly used spam filtering rules (specifically, spam assassin, but also Barracuda N
by jcr 14y ago
It seems I omitted the well known problem with HTML-only emails. There
are commonly used spam filtering rules (specifically, spam assassin, but
also Barracuda Networks and probably a lot of others) where sending
HTML-only email adds to the (combined weight) probability of the message
being marked as spam. In less pedantic terms, HTML-only counts against
you. Depending on the weight given to the rule by the mail admin, the
weight can be enough to automatically mark the message as spam
(hypothetical kook config), but I haven't seen it weighted that high in
practice.
As for the generation of multi-part MIME messages, this is usually
done by the creator of the email (the sending system/client), but
there's a caveat...
As a former calligrapher, I understand your love of typography. I know
some of the very simple and basic design aspects of using typography
for for more effective communication, but I haven't ever really studied
it. A lot of the artistic effective design stuff goes over my head.
If you do use fonts (typefaces) in your HTML emails, it would be wise to
include them as attachments (MIME parts) rather than access them from a
remote server. The reason is simple; many HTML email rendering engines
in MUA and web based email systems actively thwart "web bugs" in HTML
emails.
A "web bug" is defined as any means of tracking if an email is opened,
including all network traffic generated by accessing remote resources
(like font files). If you used a font that resides on a server you
controlled, you could track if the email was viewed by the recipient
through your log files.
If an email message contains "web bugs", the receiving system and/or
client might create a defanged version of the message and either replace
the MIME part of the problematic version, or alternatively, add a new
MIME part to the email that is then used for rendering.
Though you might think the defanging of "web bugs" is straight out of
kook land, it's entirely real and very wide spread. All modern web mail
implementations and local email clients at least try to thwart remote
tracking when rendering HTML emails.
Sadly, off the top of my head I'm unable to recall if a font file binary
can be embedded within the html source as textual data (i.e. like base64
encoding of image data, favicons, etc.), but this might work. If not,
you'll need to manually add the fonts as attachments if they aren't
automatically attached by your email client/service.
In both the attachment and embedded data cases, you're now fighting with
the variance of HTML rendering support in browsers or email clients, so
testing to see if your fonts will render properly will be a whole lot of
work across a whole lot of systems/software.
Lastly, as you might imagine, giving away free copies of copyrighted
fonts can result in substantial legal nightmares. When picking your
fonts, you need to be really careful about the license terms of the
fonts you use.
With a bit of effort, you can get what you want working on the majority
of modern systems, and if you include a plain text version and the
required fonts, you can also avoid most of the spam traps and similar
problems. Good luck with it!