[Sigia-l] Images in HTML newsletters

[Welie, Martijn van]

Hi,

We're having an internal debate about how to deal with images in HTML
newsletters.
Most newsletters that I personally receive fetch the images from the server.
The email only contains the HTML.

However, with most new email clients such as Outlook2003 and Thunderbird,
the images are not automatically loaded. Therefore the HTML is rendered
without images and looks crappy. Users get a message that some images have
not been loaded but I wonder how many people actually see it and choose to
download the images.

So alternatively, we could embed all the images in the email message so that
we know for sure that the newsletter looks decent for all people. Our client
is of course very worried about the looks of the newsletter.

But if you want to do some measurements regarding the opening of email, you
need to embed an image that must be loaded from a server, otherwise you
cannot measure.

So is the ideal option to pack all images in the mail itself except for the
one that is used for measurements?
The side-effect of this is that people with the new email clients will see a
goodlooking newsletter but they will not load the measurement image unless
they actively click on the 'download images' message....and see nothing
change...;-)

Does anybody similar experiences?

Regards,

Martijn