How to Send a Rich HTML Newsletter Email via Your Domino Server

Recently, the company I work for decided that they wanted to send out an electronic newsletter with a nicely rendered html email.

We got some offsite designers to provide us with a html file but it just wouldn't render correctly when sent from Lotus Notes. We were creating the email by creating a new memo then putting the cursor in the body and selecting File, Import.

The resulting import was close, but not perfect.

On a whim, I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird (it will be a cold day in hell before I use outlook), and set up the outgoing mail server as a SMTP server with our domino server's address.

I ignored the POP settings because I wasn't trying to get inbound email.

Finally, I tweaked the from address on the email so that it would come from our domain and sent it to our distribution group. The mail went smoothly and correctly formatted. Since my "from address" was an internal mailbox, all replies/bounces will go to that address.

People often forget that you don't have to use a Notes client to send mail via a domino server.

Comments

Palmi said…

you can send HTML email from NOTES.
I have created a Email Marketing DB that sends out Both RT and HTML on a given date and Time. I use Jake´s way of doing it but added my thouch to it and its 100 % HTML both in M$ product and Gmail Hotmail
http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/FISR-6MQSWV

Palmi

9:10 am

Gavin Bollard said…

Thanks for the link, I knew there was a way to do it in Notes but not without writing my own app.

If I wanted something that I could just insert the HTML in and that I could hand over to my users, there was no other choice.

IBM should seriously consider shipping a "html newsletter" template as a standard notes DB.

9:39 am

Anonymous said…

PalmiLord,

any chance of a sample db ??

cheers

10:33 am

Palmi said…

Am doing a Xpage DB with this in mind in agust - send me an email palmi_Lord@hotmail.com

1:29 am

Palmi said…

"IBM should seriously consider shipping a "html newsletter" template as a standard notes DB.
" I aggree / ED are you reading this ? while you are at it then add a Generic XML View with Chart Class ( Google Chart) for standard report tool to a template that is included into Domino - thanks

1:33 am

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