Making Multipart text/html email

April 7, 2005 4:38 PM

I can't figure out how to do a multipart email message in Eudora 6 or Outlook 11 - basically an email that is HTML, (retaining an image map and attributes - don't ask), and those viewing from Unix get a text-only version of the message.
posted by bkdelong to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

"Those viewing from Unix" means something different from what it seems you think it means. There are many Unix mailreaders which will handle HTML messages with attachments in the way you're familiar with.

Regardless, if you compose a MIME message with attachments, someone looking at the body of the message with a non-MIME aware mailreader is going to see the non-text parts: a bunch of HTML markup and Base64-encoded crap. There are character-cell MIME-capable mailreaders such as Mutt which are intelligent enough to discard most of that crap, but you don't specify what software is being used by the Unix user in question, so it's hard to say what it'll look like to them.
posted by majick at 8:06 PM on April 7, 2005

Outlook doesn't do this. Don't know about Eudora, though. I think you're going to have to buy a specialized mail client, something like e-campaign. Clients like this typically give you two windows to put your message in, one for plaintext and one for your html.

Here's a page with the nuts and bolts on how it happens.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 9:07 PM on April 7, 2005

SSF, that's silly. When you send a Rich text or HTML message from Outlook, via Exchange server, to an address outside your organization, an automatic conversion process is triggered, and the recipient will see both a plain text part, and a rich text part.

Actually I am pretty sure this will work even without Exchange being present.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 8:08 AM on April 8, 2005

Not silly. The poster wants the recipient to see one of two versions, not both. (guessing here) If the mailing includes a graphic of a table (row/columns), in the html version you display the graphic, but in the plaintext version you have to include the same information with just text and spacing.

Multipart MIME is specifically for messages in which you only want the recipient to see one version, based on detection of the client's capabilities. Outlook doesn't do this.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 10:31 AM on April 8, 2005

Well, we'd need the original poster to clarify, but as I read it, he just wanted to make sure he could send a piece of HTML mail which was viewable on non-HTML capable clients. Not two different versions for two clients. For this, Outlook (or most any other HTML-capable client) is sufficient.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 9:25 PM on April 8, 2005