Sending email in HTML format directly from filePro

Sun Dec 4 11:01:51 PST 2011

On 12/4/2011 1:05 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Bill Campbell"<bill at celestial.com>
>
>> On Sat, Dec 03, 2011, Larry Hoover wrote:
>>> I'm creating emails directly from filePro and sending them out via mutt
>>> in Linux. I am successful with plain text emails, but html format does
>>> not render in html. Has anyone done this? Can it be done? Is it a
>>> function of the mutt or sendmail?
>>
>> This sounds like you're not getting the proper mail headers and
>> MIME parts right.
>
> I don't believe that mutt knows *how* to original HTML emails.
>
> Larry needs to understand, if he doesn't already, that HTML email *must*
> be MIME multipart/alternative with a text/plain and a text/HTML part, and
> *should* have some useful content in the text/plain part to avoid pissing
> off recipients who cannot (or like me, choose not to) read HTML email.
>
> (There are good security reasons not to read HTML email...)
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra

You can send a pure html email without any multipart mime just by 
putting content-type: text/html in the regular mail headers.

I don't know how to make mutt do it because I generate my emails 
directly, including headers and feed them into sendmail, no mutt or 
other mua.

mutt is just a convenience to get attachements encoded into base64 and 
generate a few lines of mime headers. You can do it yourself almost as 
easily and get a lot more flexability, not to mention replacing an 
external black box, mutt, with some filepro and/or shell code of your 
own that will never change how it works except when you want it to, will 
never not-work etc.

Generate a text file test.eml that looks like this, not including the 
"--------":

--------
To: larry at hoovercs.com
From: larry at hoovercs.com
Subject: test message
Content-Type: text/html

<html><body>
This is a <b>bold</b> new test.
</body></html>
--------

Now feed this file into "sentmail -ti" (it usually doesn't matter what 
MTA you really have, smail, qmail, postfix, mmdf, or actual sendmail, 
they all have a program or symlink called "sendmail" and all takes the 
most common sendmail arguments.

sendmail -ti < test.eml

That's it.
Just cut&paste the thing above and try it right in a shell session.

The sweet trick for filepro is to take regular old print output and 
print it to a file with nocodes, that stick it into a minimal file like 
above with only the <pre></pre> tag around the whole thing.

--------
To: larry at hoovercs.com
From: larry at hoovercs.com
Subject: test message
Content-Type: text/html

<html><body><pre>
(entire filepro form printed with nocodes)
</pre></body></html>
--------

-- 
bkw