[quote user="tmstein"]

[quote user="Mike"]
... I suppose David might not want to put a full-blown HTML editor in there when perhaps very few people would use it. ..
[/quote]

What I had in mind was just the option to edit the html in a normal text editor. It could look like the raw view flap section when you open an html email. Some syntax highlighting would of course be nice but not essential as I could write the code in my html editor e.g. Homesite or whatever. The current PM "WYSIWYG" editor could remain as it is and could just ignore code it does not know.[/quote]

I wouldn't know anything about actually implementing something like that, and I couldn't really comment. At least your feature request is listed on the forum now.

What I can do is suggest how you could currently do what you want to do. I suggest Thunderbird would be the tool to use. I'd guess that, generally, people deliberately composing HTML mail for newsletters and suchlike for businesses would be using specialist tools not end-user email clients. I just took a look at the headers for a few. Most I've been sent don't record the X-Mailer. One has X-Mailer: aspNetEmail ver 3.1.5.0 which doesn't sound like an ordinary general-purpose mail client. The only email client for home users that I know of that does allow you to insert raw tags is Thunderbird - and, as I say, I think that's because they inherited the Netscape Composer code, which was really written for another purpose.

What you could do is write your HTML page in your favourite editor and save it. Then open the page in a web browser and view source. If you then start a Thunderbird email and click Insert > HTML a little composing window labelled "Enter HTML tags and text" pops up. The raw HTML, excepting everything outside the body tags, goes in there and can be further edited there if desired. Here's a page explaining the functionality:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Edit_HTML_source

I'd send from there and pick up the results in Pegasus Mail, Thunderbird, and Outlook Express - and perhaps in Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail webmail services, too. If the mail doesn't look as you'd wish in any of those, you could tweak the HTML code till it does.
 

David et al.,
One function which I am missing (or which I could not find yet, so please give me a hint if I haven't worked it out yet[:$]) is the option to self code the outgoing message such as multipart messages (e.g. especially the html part). I would like to send a plain text message as one part and code the html message myself (or be able to modify the html code) to be sent as the html part. I do compose and send out newsletters and this would come very handy as to make sure both, html as well as plain text part, would come out the way I want them.
Cheers
Thomas

Hello!

You can paste an existing HTML-file into the Message Editor window. When writing a message, right-click in the Message Editor window, then choose "Import HTML file...". If Pegasus Mail is set to create multipart messages automatically, you will have the HTML-structure of your choice and a text version that Pegasus Mail will automatically create (depending on the HTML-part).
However, I think you cannot edit the text part and the HTML part separated from each other; at least, you cannot within Pegasus Mail. When importing the HTML-file, you would have to accept the text version Pegasus Mail would create based on the HTML-part.

Does that help? If it does not, you may try to edit the final copy of a message to be sent; that would have to be done outside of Pegasus Mail manually.

Thanks Thomas N,

What I had in mind was an additional flap for "Raw edit" in the message editor so that you could switch between the two editing modes ("wysiwyg" and source).

I believe that this feature would be very interesting for all those who need to send out e.g. more elaborate newsletters etc. without using very specialised other software packages.

Would such an option be within the technical scope?

Thanks

Thomas

[quote user="tmstein"]David et al.,
One function which I am missing (or which I could not find yet, so please give me a hint if I haven't worked it out yet[:$]) is the option to self code the outgoing message such as multipart messages (e.g. especially the html part). I would like to send a plain text message as one part and code the html message myself (or be able to modify the html code) to be sent as the html part. I do compose and send out newsletters and this would come very handy as to make sure both, html as well as plain text part, would come out the way I want them.
Cheers
Thomas
[/quote]

Just a note, the way you create the look of an html message is not necessarily the way the recipient will see the message, but I'm sure you are aware of that. Each e-mail client or browser will display the content differently, specifically if the user has setup it's own preferences.

[quote user="Han v.d. Bogaerde"]

Just a note, the way you create the look of an html message is not necessarily the way the recipient will see the message, but I'm sure you are aware of that. Each e-mail client or browser will display the content differently, specifically if the user has setup it's own preferences.

[/quote]

Thanks Han,
Yes, I am very aware of the fact that the recipient will see the message very differently depending on the email client, browser used as well as his/her email or desktop settings. However, that is also the reason I would like to have better control on the code so that I could test and then hopefully come up with some code which would provide a good (at least for me acceptable) results across the platforms - including a nice pure text version.[;)]
Cheers
Thomas

 

[quote user="tmstein"]I would like to have better control on the code so that I could test ...[/quote]

What you feed Pegasus via "import" does make a difference to what it outputs. So you do have some room for manoeuvre, as you'll find out if you do test. I don't normally send HTML, as I've no particular need to, but I just tested to remind myself. I tried three different forms of a fairly simple message. First, I put all styling in the head element:

 <style type="text/css">
body { font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;}
.indent { padding-left: 1em; }
h1 { color: #888; background: #FFF; font-size: 18px; }
h2 { color: #005A9C; background: #FFF; font-size: 16px; }
p { font-size: 13px;}
</style>

 
Secondly, I changed the document so that all of the styling was inline.

 
Thirdly, I rewrote the document in a very old-fashioned style using "tag soup" HTML, faking up the indents with non-breaking spaces, adjusting the fonts with font "face", "size", and "color" attributes. When I made three emails, in each case importing one of these documents, each email arrived at the other end looking somewhat different.

 
Not all styles arrive: the indents got lost and most of the font-styling was lost when I used inline HTML. Strangely, the colour of one of the fonts was altered by Pegasus when I used styling in the head of the document. The tag-soup HTML gave the most faithful rendering.

In short, you have got some control, since the email that's sent is different depending on how you code the HTML you import.

In general, I'd say that inline CSS is safer to use in email. (However, my brief test -- if you can call it that -- seems to show that Pegasus doesn't cope well with inline HTML that's sent it via "import" (although it does itself send any styles that it does send as inline).) Simple CSS-styling -- colors, fonts, etc, are likely coped with by most modern clients, so long as they are sent inline. But grotty old font-attributes might be an even safer choice. Maybe you should even abandon the structure given to your document by heading tags and fake headings up with "size" attributes in a old-fashioned "font" tag.
 

For complex layouts, tables are better than CSS layout -- the latest version of Outlook, among others, is not going to be able to cope with CSS-layouts. (Outlook has actually gone backwards in its capabilities, since it now uses the Office rendering engine not IE.) And it's unsafe to style the "body" tag, because some of your subscribers will undoubtedly be using webmail, and webmail services will strip out the body tags. (They have to because the page the subscriber sees in his browser has "body" tags itself, so they avoid having two sets.)

The rule seems to be: Be as retrograde in your HTML as possible, and there's more chance the receiver will get something that won't trip up his mail client.
 

Mike,
Many thanks for your very detailed description of your test and all the efforts you have put into it. That was very helpful indeed [Y]. However, your experiences also confirms that it is bad enough to deal with how differently email clients are rendering html but it becomes close to unpredictable and unpractical if Pegasus applies its own corrections or 'views' to the html code 'on top of the code' which was imported. Therefore I believe that adding an additional editor flap called something like [Raw edit] would greatly resolve this problem by allowing to directly edit the code and then switch back and forth between the different views to check the results, of course assuming that code would not be altered once sent out. Of course test emails would need to be sent to check the results on different clients but at least we would know what is been sent out.
Cheer
Thomas

[quote user="tmstein"]Mike,
Many thanks for your very detailed description of your test and all the efforts you have put into it. That was very helpful indeed[/quote]

You're welcome. There are some interesting notes on the problems with HTMl email here:

 http://www.anandgraves.com/html-email-guide 

[quote]Therefore I believe that adding an additional editor flap called something like [Raw edit] would greatly resolve this problem[/quote]

I suppose David might not want to put a full-blown HTML editor in there when perhaps very few people would use it.

Here's not the place to recommend another client, but you can do raw editing in Thunderbird -- I suppose that's because they inherit the old Netscape Composer code. Obviously, it's not as nice as Pegasus for general use, and I wouldn't suggest you use it instead as your primary email client. But with the size of today's hard drives, I guess there'd be no harm in having a copy of it as well just for the purposes of sending the HTML newsletters -- and you'd need it anyway for testing. I suggest you'd want to test in several of the most popular Windows clients, in the most popular webmail services -- and make sure what you write looks OK on the Mac as well, if possible.

On your comment about Raw View.     Welcome back WordPerfect Reveal-codes option[:S].  I don't know if TER editor can do an equivalent (in RTF)  But I wonder how many people want to write raw RTF and inject it into a message composition screen.

IMHO this illustrates the whole point to forwarding a received message content intact.  If a selective block of the original message is to be inserted in your new message, it no longer belongs to the original user, and should be formatted to match the main content of the new message (with a PRE or CITE tag) to acknowledge the original author.  In Pegasus Mail this would be achieved through use of a different font such as Italic style.

Martin 

[quote user="irelam"]On your comment about Raw View.     Welcome back WordPerfect Reveal-codes option[:S].  I don't know if TER editor can do an equivalent (in RTF)  But I wonder how many people want to write raw RTF and inject it into a message composition screen.[/quote] 

Surely, the problem with that would be that no one should be putting RTF on the Internet. Plain text, sure; HTML, with reservations; text/enriched, just about - although it's effectively been superseded: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text 

But sending Microsoft RTF on the Internet is a no-no. Pegasus has that box in "Mail Preferences and Settings" under "Sending mail" that says: 

[quote]For mail sent to local addresses, use MS-RTF formatting 

[emphasis mine][/quote] 

... and very sensible, too.  Locally, within an all-Windows environment one imagines it would be fine. On the Net, you'd end up with problems - and Outlook, when using MS-RTF, does give these problems - because it's not a valid format for mail. Funny post just today on that subject:

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/mac911/2007/12/nowinmail/index.php 

[quote user="Mike"]
... I suppose David might not want to put a full-blown HTML editor in there when perhaps very few people would use it. ..
[/quote]

Mike,
What I had in mind was just the option to edit the html in a normal text editor. It could look like the raw view flap section when you open an html email. Some syntax highlighting would of course be nice but not essential as I could write the code in my html editor e.g. Homesite or whatever. The current PM "WYSIWYG" editor could remain as it is and could just ignore code it does not know. I am only interested in pure text and html and not rtf of course.
Cheers
Thomas