Email with dynamic content
 

Hello,

Please could you tell me if it's possible to send an email which, within the body, displays content that is linked from a webpage?

For example the body could come from a webpage and then if I wanted to change the content I would just change the webpage, so when a user opens their email it would just display the new information?

Thanks,

MrS

In short form, no.

In long form, dynamic content requires a degree of server-side intelligence to parse the scripts. So the only way you could do it would be to generate images server side and publish these in your email... but that would be fairly pointless and also slow down the opening of the emails for the readers.

Don't re-invent the wheel. If what you really want is efficient mailing list management software that uses templates at its heart, then that's what you should be looking for. Someone I know uses MadMimi, they seem happy with it, never used it myself, so not really a recommendation as such, just a name to look at.

I think what you've descibed would be classed as active content, not dynamic content. Dynamic content tends to be used as a concept in spam mailshots where a standard e-mail is fettled for individual users automatically based on held data - e.g. purchase history / enquiry history / address.....

Now to your query
In theory yes it should be possible, but what are you trying to achieve?
Most e-mails are rapidly lost in the noise when newer ones arrive. For your plan to work the recipients would have to be constantly searching for an old mail. However more fundamentally, any e-mail client worth using is going to block active content by default as a security measure. Active content in an e-mail is a security risk, and even if the e-mail client doesn't block it, the antivirus or firewall software will.
Conceptually none of your recipients are going to thank you for sending them an e-mail which is a very big security risk: active content = serious risk of malware

Thanks guys, the reason for the question is that the content of the emails is to be a summary of user-defined-content on a website. Therefore there is a chance of me receiving a take-down request that I am happy to action, but I would be unable to 'take-down' all the emails that have already been sent out. Is there a practical solution you can think of?

Yes. Speak to a lawyer.

PPRuNe is not the place for legal advice.

If you are knowingly transmitting information that you are aware is likely to be subject to 'take-down' requests, then legal advice is very much what you need if you're hoping to find a way to do it that will land you in the least amount of hot water possible.

Only sensible technical way I can see to do it would be an embedded link in the e-mail which leads to a summary page on the website. The users would have to click on the link to view the summary page. When you change the content on the summary page, the users see the changed contents. If you delete the page, the link then fails.
Actually embedding the data into the mail won't work: it just has to be the link to the data
However this presupposes that your users don't download or cache the webpage on their PCs. It also presupposes that you block robots from (e.g The Wayback Machine) from trawling the site....

However I'm with mixture on this. Its imperative that you get the legal side sorted out. If you intend to run a website which hosts other peoples copyrighted material then you are in for a world of legal pain

That's the sort of mail that both my e-mail providers (BT, gmail) send to junk, unless I've told them in advance not to.

And any good security program should see it as cross-site scripting and block the link until approved, as will most e-mail clients