[Zope] sending HTML-Mail with Images

[Dieter Maurer]

Stadtverwaltung Schwarzenberg writes:
 > I'd like to send email from my webserver, using zope. this all works well,
 > except for one thing I cannot figure out. I'd like to send HTML-Formatted
 > E-Mail which include Pictures (embedded in the HTML).
You are heading for problems...

  *  first, you must send "multipart/related" messages when
     you want to include the images together with the HTML text
     See the MIME spec for details on this message type.

  *  second: many mail reading agents, a prominent example is
     Outlook 97, do not support "multipart/related".
     
     We tried for weeks to find out why out nicely formatted
     HTML messages sometime were catastrophically distorted.
     Finally, we found out that it has been Outlook 97.
     It does not understand "mulitpart/related". But rather
     then telling this fact, it
     converted the HTML into plain text (discarding
     all images) and displayed this text. Instead of beautiful
     formatted tables the customers got garbeled text...

     We have been unable to reproduce this problem, because
     we already had Outlook 2000 which handles "multipart/related"
     correctly.

  *  third: many firewalls do not understand "multipart/related"
     and discard messages with such attachments.

There are two alternatives:

  *  Send HTML messages without images and let the images reference
     from the Web site (of course, this requires an online connection).

  *  Convert into PDF and send PDF attachments


Dieter