NOTE: This is an advanced feature, so if you don't already know what HTML means, then please refer to other computer books and online resources for more information on that, or otherwise just stick to plain text messages for your emails.
When defining an email correspondence, you have the option of making the body of the email message be in HTML, which means you can have formatted text and web links in the email instead of just plain text.
To create an HTML body for your email, you should use some HTML editing program (like Netscape, FrontPage, or even Word has an option to save a document as HTML). Create a new HTML document and save it anywhere on your computer's hard drive (it may be convenient to save it in the Camelot folder). Remember also that if you insert any graphics into the HTML that the source for those should be a valid web link, not just from a file on your hard drive.
Once you have your HTML document, you then follow these steps to make that HTML text be your email body for the email correspondence you are defining in Camelot:
1. From the Misc/Setup pull-down menu, choose Correspondence Definitions.
2. In the list on the left, select the email correspondence you are working with. If you have not yet created the new email correspondence, then click the Add New Source/Mailout button and enter your description of "Email..." to define the email correspondence.
3. Now to make the body of this email be the HTML you have created, go to the Mailout/Correspondence tab on the right, and right-click on the Long Note / Email Body Text box there, and choose the Load from File option.
4. Then browse to choose the HTML file you have created, and double-click on it. The HTML text will then be inserted into the Email Body Text box there. It will just appear as plain text so there will be HTML codes intermingled in the text. That is how it is supposed to look.
You can still insert merge fields into the email body, but be sure that you insert them into the right place in the HTML code.
IMPORTANT:
Often when the customer/client receives an html email it will be viewed as plain text with Outlook and some other email programs. When this happens, there's a little bar at the top of the email screen that says "This message was converted to plain text", and if you click on that little message bar where it says that, and choose "Display as HTML", then it will let you show the picture (you sometimes also have to right-click on the picture placeholder and choose "Download pictures").
The receiving email program (in most cases Outlook) makes a decision about whether or not to display messages as html or plain text based on whether or not it thinks the message might be spam. We suggest that you use an online smtp mail host solution like Jango (http://www.jangosmtp.com/), which is an smtp mail host that lets you setup a free account and use it to send a limited amount of emails free a month, and if you need to do more than that, then there is a fee (but it is very reasonable). The advantage of an online smtp service like that is that it improves your email deliverability.
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