SendStudio NX Update

Published June 21, 2006 by Chris Smith

It's been a while since I've blogged, because I've been busy trying to get SendStudio NX finished.

I just added a new feature which a lot of people should like (well I hope so!). You'll be able to embed images from a newsletter inside the email you send out.

The current version references the images via a URL, so you can't view the newsletter offline or change the paths to images because that will break your newsletters.

The new option will embed the images with the email, so the emails can be viewed offline. There are advantages to both methods, so the choice will be yours when you send a newsletter or create/edit an autoresponder.

If you leave them on your website, then the email size is greatly reduced however you can't view the newsletter offline.

If you include the images with your email, you can view the newsletter offline but the email size is increased (in some cases it would be a substantial increase).

There were about 12 different cases I had to worry about when adding this new feature (I think I covered all options):

- multipart (both html & text versions of the email are included) emails with attachments, embedding the images
- multipart emails with attachments, not embedding the images
- multipart emails without attachments, embedding the images
- multipart emails without attachments, not embedding the images

- html emails with attachments, embedding the images
- html emails with attachments, not embedding the images
- html emails without attachments, embedding the images
- html emails without attachments, not embedding the images

On top of that I had to make sure that sending text emails with and without attachments worked ok, and that setting or not setting the embedded image flag didn't stop them from working properly. (If I missed any scenarios post a comment and let me know!)

Phew!

The main problem I had was making sure that the boundaries between the email sections lined up properly and were only included where they were needed.

Including extra boundaries made my email program think there were attachments when there weren't. Including them in the wrong places stopped the email from displaying at all, so it was tricky to get it working for all test cases.

Another thing crossed off the list!