UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm a programmer not a sys admin, so please excuse this if it seems a little out of place, but I think it applies to this forum. When I send my HTML newsletter from the server it comes in as plain text on some email programs and not others. Eudora is fine; Outlook Express, Hotmail, and Lotus Notes come in as plain text.

We are using "mail" to send the messages inside a php file and stepping through a user db in MYSQL. I suspect it is something to do with the way mail works or we need to add a line of code, but this is not my area of expertise, so any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your time!

The only clean way to tell to the clients that the message contains text which should be displayed in HTML is by using MIME. Otherwise you will always rely on the client being smart enough to recognise the special type of the data that was posted (see Eudora).

-- Dolom --

dmennis,
OK. Here it is. I struggled with the same problem and there is a lot more to it than just "using MIME". That is all well and good, but you can drive yourself crazy on that. Your MIME verbage and following html code could be perfect and it still not work.

My team here found that we could not use the UNIX mail command. Instead, we used a "cat" command and piped it to a telnet session directly to the mail server.

The syntax is like this:

cat /u1/data/testfile | telnet localhost 25

it then worked beautifully. The test file is a simple text file with the standard MIME headers and html text following.

Hope this helps!