Need e-mail client with html editing capabilitites

Hi. I need to create an e-mail for an e-mail marketing campaign that will allow me to insert a table or div tag with a background image and text over the image. I have not found an e-mail client with a rich text editor that will allow me to do this. I know html and css, but not any other coding languages and don’t have more advanced technical skills than that and am in a bit of a hurry so I’d prefer to find something simple and easy to use that will let me do that fairly quickly. Any useful suggestions or tips would be appreciated. Thanks.

I think you can do that in Thunderbird and even Outlook. Still, why not just use a code editor? You can create the email in your code editor, then grab the code, paste it in to Thunderbird/Outlook (there is some option you need to choose first, though) and then send. Another option is to create the HTML email file, open it in Safari, and then choose File > Share > Email this Page.

Thunderbird can’t do it. That is one of the e-mail client/editors I have tried. It only allows very limited editing capabilities as far as I can tell. It allows you to add a table, but I don’t see any way to add a background image for the table. It allows you to add a background color and you can add attributes. I tried adding a div to see if I could use that to insert the image, but there is no way to edit the div after it is created as far as I see. There is no way to edit the code in the e-mail directly that I know of.

I created code that displays what I need on a web page, but if I paste the code or table displayed on the web page (stored locally on my computer), then the image in the background will not be displayed in the e-mail online. If I upload the image online and use an external code, there is a risk of legal consequences because it looks like a stock image.

Gmail has something called google drive that says you can store files on your e-mail (basically like an attachment, but with files stored on your e-mail, not sure what the difference is), but I don’t see a way I can get the html code for the table to link to any images attached using google drive or other method to display images in the e-mail. I’m not sure if there is a way to embed an image displayed for the background of a table or div tag in an e-mail.

This thunderbird plugin looks like a possibility: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/stationery/

I’m sure you could place them somewhere online (deep within your site, for example) where they’d never be seen … though if you are breaching copyright, perhaps review that decision anyway.

I’m not sure if there is a way to embed an image displayed for the background of a table or div tag in an e-mail.

There is, but support for embedded images is not perfect across email clients. You can turn your image into raw code and paste it into your template:

http://dataurl.net/#about

Maybe there is a way to embed browser detection into the table with js and display different code for the image depending on the browser? I dont have a lot of experience with js and am definitely not as proficient in it as html or css, but I might be able to manage that assuming the javascript in the table will copy into the e-mail. Has anyone done something similar before?

I could try the Thunderbird plugin once I find one compatible with my computer, but I’m guessing when it embeds the image, someone might be able to download it from the e-mail and so there would be a copyright issue for distributing the image in a way accessible to recipients? Anyone have enough experience using Thunderbird to tell me?

Edit: I sent an image embedded in e-mail with thunderbird (no table) to test this and the image can easily be saved, so I dont think this is likely to be a safe option. Then again, It might be a lot harder to get the image file if it is displayed in the background of a table…

Is that plugin available for mac?

Getting HTML email to work is hard enough without trying to dodge law suits. If you are worried about using those images, the obvious answer is that you shouldn’t be using them.

Email layouts are hard to get right, and messing with JS as well is asking for more trouble, IMHO. My feeling is that you are making this all a lot harder than it needs to be.

It doesn’t matter much what platform you are using–plugins are typically platform independent (so long as the application itself is available on the platform you’re looking for).

Have you testede email-newsletter-template.com/shop ? They have a free version, and you can export the templates to your favorite newsletter script or to Outlook, Thuunderbird, etc.
There is also High Impact Email which is more exepensive though, but has hundreds more templates.