Send HTML Emails with Gmail and Google Docs

All popular email programs – from web-based Gmail and Yahoo! Mail to desktop-based Microsoft Outlook to the mail app on your mobile phone – are now HTML (or rich-text) capable. Thus, your email messages can have custom fonts, inline images, lists, tables and other formatting similar to a web page.

But there’s one little problem – how do you write an HTML email?

The built-in WYSIWYG editors, like the one shown above, offer basic functions for formatting text but there are things you cannot do. For instance, how do you insert a 3×5 table inside a Gmail message? Can you right-align an image and wrap text around it similar to Word?

All this is easily possible in HTML but since your email program won’t let your compose a message directly in HTML, you’re stuck.

I have two easy solutions for this problem. The first is HTML Mail(LINK) – here you can write an HTML message and send it yourself or anyone else with a click. The tool has a simple WYSIWYG editor but you can also switch to the code view and compose messages directly with HTML markup.

There’s another alternative that uses Google Docs to send HTML mails from your Gmail account itself. It works for both Google Apps and regular Google Accounts.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:         Due: 01/21/2016

1. Use either the method in the video above; or use HTML Mail(LINK) to create a HTML email either as a Christmas Card (use your images and text from the previous lesson) or create a HTML email of a different theme--
1. MUST HAVE AN IMAGE.
2. MUST HAVE A BACKGROUND COLOR.
3. MUST HAVE TEXT OF DIFFERENT COLOR AND SIZE.
2. Paste a COPY of your EMAIL SOURCE CODE into a NEW POST on your BLOG. Be sure to PASTE it into the HTML side of the POST EDITOR in your BLOG post.
3. Send the new HTML email to me too: mwinkelman@northstarcharter.org
4. In the same POST as above write a paragraph on the difference between an HTML email and a "standard" email.