May 19th, 2006

I've never had the need to develop many HTML emails, though lately they seem to the magic cure for all business ills at my full-time job.
I can complete them and they turn out OK using tables and making sure the images are absolutely referenced on a server.
How are these typically done by Amazon, ebay, Crate & Barrel, etc? Is it just down and dirty basic coding. Most of the sites I design utilize CSS layouts and styling extensively so whenever I do one of these emails I feel like I'm stepping back a bit.

Hey guys,

I'm looking for your advice and help on an email related question. Specifically, I want to create a system that allows visitors to my website to send email messages to third parties using their own email address with one-click. I heard that this is a questionable practice, used by spammers, no less--but I've seen it used also on a lot of legitimate websites, which usually encourage you to fill in your name and emaill address and click to send a prewritten text to a government official. Case in point: http://www.transalt.org/e-bulletin/2006/May/0518.html#parks

That is one site among many that implement this stuff. I guess what I'm trying to find out is how do they do it? You'd have to rig up the protocols of the email server to accept sending email to third parties, right? I have no problem setting up the form itself, but am confused about these two things: 1) how to rig up an email server to send email from a different email account (and not just one time only!) and 2) how to relay the information a visitor types from the website to the email server. (I guess I need to use something like asp to sort that out?)

At any rate, please help. If this is not the right forum, can anyone direct me to a forum where I can pose this question????

Thank you!!!