| As the online world changed in the nineties from | | | | large proportion of automated e-mail is transmitted |
| informational to commercial and highly competitive, | | | | via SMTP MIME format. SMTP stands for Simple Mail |
| marketers embraced the new technology and the | | | | Transfer Protocol and if nothing else, you'll learn a |
| need has arisen to send graphically appealing | | | | few more acronyms if you stick around. Internet |
| newsletters and marketing messages. You have only | | | | e-mail is so closely associated with the SMTP and |
| seconds to capture attention, and the right picture | | | | MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP |
| will grab quicker than the right copy, as they say, "a | | | | MIME e-mail. |
| picture can be worth a thousand words". Just ask | | | | 300 Manual Article Submissions. One Time Tool! |
| your clients if they would use plain white paper, | | | | Limited Time Offer |
| rather than letterhead, to send an offline message to | | | | Folks, while nobody can really agree on numbers and |
| prospects and customers. | | | | stats, we all agree on this: HTML Email Doesn't Work |
| 140000 Articles For $14.95! Fast Turn times - Easy to | | | | Properly for Millions of Recipients. |
| Order | | | | HTML email breaks in a wide variety of email inboxes. |
| Today, the vast majority of all email clients can | | | | This isn't due to your creative abilities or lack of |
| render (that is, display) HTML emails fairly well. | | | | HTML knowledge - it's due to the fact that the email |
| Notable exceptions are older versions of Lotus Notes | | | | client your recipient views your email in routinely |
| and pre AOL pre version 6.0. So whereas a few | | | | breaks your message. |
| years ago the answer to the question was rather | | | | I feel like this is worth defining, as I know a lot of |
| complex, today it really comes down to message | | | | people get very scared when we talk about clients |
| purpose, subscriber preference and multipart | | | | and servers, but will not admit it. An email client |
| messaging. Studies show that roughly 95 percent of | | | | (some "big picture" folks also call it Mail User Agent) is |
| commercial messages sent today are sent as | | | | nothing but a computer program that is used to read |
| Multi-Part MIME. | | | | and send e-mail, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, |
| Multi-part MIME is an older protocol that allows you to | | | | Thunderbird, etc. A mail server (also called a Mail |
| send both text and HTML versions of an e-mail in a | | | | Transfer Agent or MTA, or a mail exchange server) |
| single package, kind of like a sandwich. The recipient's | | | | is a computer program that transfers electronic mail |
| e-mail program then displays the HTML version, if it is | | | | messages from one computer to another. Most of |
| capable of reading that, or the text version, if it is | | | | the time, since nobody has time to learn all the |
| not. | | | | acronyms and terminology coined by those "big |
| MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions | | | | picture" people, we are used to know a mail server |
| and is an internet standard for the format of e-mail. | | | | as the entire contraption (wires and all) that runs the |
| Virtually all human written Internet e-mail and a fairly | | | | program. |