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Problem

Sometimes, when sending HTML email, Evolution does not embed the image and send it. This means that the recipient won't see your image, logo, photo, etc. Sometimes, in mass mailings, it's preferable to store images on a public server and have those images retrieved when your recipients get their email.

To work around this, this tip helps to show the necessary steps to send an email that will use off-site images.

Solution

There are three steps:

1) Create the email, and save the message.

2) Edit the message so that images are loaded from a public location, (e.g., www.something).

3) Import the newly saved message into the Draft folder and send it.

Here are the detailed instructions:

1. To create a draft of the email you want, choose HTML format, add the images you want, lay out the email, and SAVE AS DRAFT.

2. Save the image as a file in a work area (Select File/Save Message ...)

3. Using a text editor, search for "file:///" which is used to access the local copy of the image. In this case, it might look like this within the message:

<IMG SRC="file:///home/peterh/images/myimage.jpg">

4. In order to make this usable by the recipients, change everything up to the image name to:

http://www.foo.bar/images/ 

where "foo.bar" is the name of the URL you want to use.

So the email source now looks like this:

<IMG SRC="http://www.foo.bar/images/myimages.jpg"

5. Repeat the above steps for all images in the email.

6. Save the email source again.

7. Upload all images being used to a public area on an inter- or intranet site. For this purpose, let's call it http://www.foo.bar/images/

Now that the images are on a public server, it's time to reload the draft message you just fixed. This is done by IMPORTING it.

1. Select File/Import. The Evolution Import Assistant will appear.

2. Select Import a Single File.

3. Locate the message you just edited (the assistant should identify the file as an mbox file).

4. Choose the destination folder to hold the newly imported message.

Once the message is imported, you will NOT see the public images in real time. This is because the composer does not look to the WWW for images. However, they are there!

5. Add your addressees and send your email.

Example

It's possible to use a sed line to do bulk changes, provided all the images come from the same folder. For example:

sed -i 's+file:///home/peterh/images+http://foo.bar/images+g' message.fil

Of course, you would need to substitute "home/peterh" with your image locations. Or, the same could be done inside vim or emacs using similar substitute commands.

Environment

This was tested with Evolution 2.9.92

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.