Urgent request for help - auto-viewing images in an e-mail?

[bakerlonglegs]

The company I work for wants to send out a Christmas e-mail and give the money saved to charity (The St. Michael's Fellowship in London, gonna be about £600). We want to stick an image in the e-mail that basically introduces people to the charity and says Happy Christmas. However people are reluctant to open attachments they haven't asked for (don't blame them!).
We've tried sending it to friends and family for a trial run and the JPEG image just appears as an attachment. Is there any way of attaching an image that automatically appears in the email without the receiver having to double-click on an icon to open it?

Is it something to do with vCards or rich text?

Any help appreciated - it is for a good cause!!

Andy

 

[Mick_rw]

The company I work for wants to send out a Christmas e-mail and give the money saved to charity (The St. Michael's Fellowship in London, gonna be about £600). We want to stick an image in the e-mail that basically introduces people to the charity and says Happy Christmas. However people are reluctant to open attachments they haven't asked for (don't blame them!).
We've tried sending it to friends and family for a trial run and the JPEG image just appears as an attachment. Is there any way of attaching an image that automatically appears in the email without the receiver having to double-click on an icon to open it?

Is it something to do with vCards or rich text?

Any help appreciated - it is for a good cause!!

Andy

Don't know what program you use as email, but with Microssoft Outlook you can insert a picture as a signature which would appear as a picture at the bottom of your email.

 

[bigkuri]

Depends what email client they are using (amoung other things).

You could try using a *.gif format instead. May work.

 

[MasterDabber]

I can only talk about Outlook Express...
There are two options.

To insert a picture without using attachments....

Firstly, have the picture you want to use hosted on a website... eg. smugmug.
Then "Create Mail".
Then go to... Insert >> Picture.
In the box that then opens paste the url of the picture on smugmug or wherever into the "Picture Source" box. Click OK and the picture will be inserted.

The other option is to have the image you want as background to the text you want to type.

To do this....
Format > background>>picture
then browse for the picture on your hardfile that you want to use.
Using this method i would think that you would need to have a fairly transparent picture so that the overlying text could be read on top of it.

Don't know if that helps???

 

[Fanum]

Andy...if they've got their systems set up properly, then no......

There is a thing called 'buffer overun' where basically, gifs and tiffs and some other formats of pictures can be used to open virii on your pc, even though it's a picture file ( it's old but it's only just being exploited...you'll hear a lot more about it soon)

Any company with an IT manager worth their salt will have it set so you won't be able to achieve what you asked........

It's a nice idea, but no.

Why not phone them up and say 'Happy christmas'?
I reckon that'd be far more appreciated than an impersonal email.

 

[bakerlonglegs]

Thanks for the advice chaps—it does sound like the original idea is indeed a non-starter We will probably send the card out as a pdf file, which will look naff but there you go, serves us right for thinking it would be simple and leaving it so late.

 

[Greg Masters]

I think that you can do this!

Here's an e-mail that I sent on Saturday:

Don't ask me how this works, but the trick is to send an HTML format e-mail and copy'n'paste the required picture into the body of the text. If you simply attach the picture, you get an attachment!

Greg

 

[MasterDabber]

Go to Format, and tick Rich text (HTML)...
then you should be able to use Greg's cut and paste method or the suggestions I made earlier.
What I don't know is whether any company you mail to will have filters installed that will stop the pictures getting through... I think this is what Fanum is referring to.