Sending email in HTML format directly from filePro

Sun Dec 4 19:40:38 PST 2011

On 12/04/11 2:01 PM, Brian K. White wrote:
> 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>
> --------
>
Thanks to all responses.  When I do what Brian says above, it hangs in 
the sendmail queue when sent directly via sendmail -it.  When done via 
mutt with" "mutt -F /muttrc -s html larry at hoovercs.com < testmail", it 
sends the email out immediately, but arrives in plain text and looks 
like this (without the dashes):

-------------------------
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>
-------------------------
.