Casey: The simple technical answer turns out to be a hotly debated topic near and dear to the viewing public's heart.
At one place I worked for, we attempted to build an "Interactive Online Email" campaign featuring HTML emails and landing pages containing a short video and Flash slides. In practice, delivering consistant HTML email messages is messy at best when dealing with quirks of emails programs out there.
For example in Outlook 2003 images using this notation are blocked by the <i>default</i> security setting (this can be changed by the user). In the previous version this was allowed. Each of the different email programs out there-- Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook Express, Outlook, Lotus Notes and all of the others have their own way of how they will render HTML email-- some allow muti-part messaging.... others strip it out. And don't forget that many out there have email filters that will strip out everything from multi-part messages to images tags linked to the outside.
Add to this that many get very prickly about the email they recieve... spam has had such an impact on people's feelings on this topic. But on the other hand, I have seen surveys that suggest the click through rate of HTML email is higher than the response rate on direct mail -- so we will continue to see marketers blindly send out direct emails to purchased lists. (HTML email also allows the marketer to determine who opened by the email as well providing yet another metric.)
In practice, I've done the following with my clients for opt in lists.
1) Allow the customer to determine how they want their email sent. Provide choices for HTML email and plain text email -- and respect their choices.
2) Don't send out anything like Flash or Windows Media files inside of the email -- that's even less likely than pictures to be displayed on email.
3) Provide a way in HTML emails for the user to go to a webpage containing the same information -- allowing the user to go to the message in case HTML is displayed as plain text.
I've referenced an article below that talks about this topic in depth.
Take a look at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssemail/ and the associated discussion about embedding HTML inside of emails and deadling with the myrid of email clients out there.
Jeremy
> You have to reference the full http path for the image in the email,
> not just "image.jpg". You'd have to do <img src=""> > com/images/image.jpg"> for it to work.
>
> John
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Casey C Cook [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Wed 3/31/2004 5:25 PM
> To: CF-Talk
> Subject: RE: Embedding an image in cfmail
>
>
>
> Using CFMX currently. So what Im hearing is use <cfmail type = "html">
> and
> its possible. We have been unable to get it to work as of yet. Thanks
> for
> the responses.
>
> CC
>
>
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