Email help

[Anon]

I am in the process of creating a newsletter for my company. I would like to send HTML to my users that have compatible email clients, but also allow non-html clients to read the emails. I noticed that most companies to day design their emails so if your client can read html it will display it and if it cannot it displays traditional text at the top and then the html code at the end of the email.

I have been testing this and I cannot get it to work. I would like to have the plain text at the top not show up in the email if the email client is html compatible. How can i design my headers to do this?

Also, is there a proper way to handle bounce emails? Even better can they automatically be deleted from a database if they bounce back?

Thanks for any help

Chris

[Anon]

Place the text at the top of the message in a html comment.

<!-- text only message -->

html message

a cheap trick, but it should work.

[Anon]

The way to do it is create a multipart mime message with one part containing the HTML and another part called multipart/alternative that is the text equivalent of your HTML-enabled message.

Good mail clients that see this will behave properly and:
1. If they have HTML capability will just display the HTML-enabled message.
2. If they are not HTML capable (like Mutt), will display the text equivalent and indicate the HTML part as an attachment.

There is more in terms of explanation on how to do it that I have done above.

About your bouncing mails, you will need to pipe the bouncing mails to a script (preferably Perl) and you can parse the headers and do whatever (like unsubscribing people) you want. I assume you have full access to the mail configuration to do this. Also, I know this works for postfix, dunno about Windows mailers.

--Kartic

[Anon]

About your bouncing mails, you will need to pipe the
bouncing mails to a script (preferably Perl)

That glosses over how you get the bounced messages to begin with. Make sure you send them out with a valid, unique email address that you don't use for any other purpose. Now, you just collect the messages from that address using whatever means you like (one of the POP3 perl modules, for example, or PHP if you like) and deal with them.

[Anon]

Hmm, that looks a little less than helpful. What I meant to say was, be sure to send them out with a valid <b>return address</b> so you can collect the bounce messages in the first place.

[Anon]

Actually, if Chris will setup a mail user called [e-mail], mails that bounce back will be returned to [e-mail].

[e-mail] must be used such that it is actually a 'send only' address..so any incoming mails to newsletter can be subject to a mail filter script. If a user responds to [e-mail], you can safely discard the mail but if the mail comes for POSTMASTER or Mailer-Daemon, then you must dissect it, see what the problem was and handle it.

On a UNIX system, it is fairly simple to set it up. In the system wide aliases file (/etc/aliases), just add an entry like this:
newsletter "| /usr/local/bin/mail-filter.pl"

This means that incoming mails to this user will be handled by the script mail-filter.pl