Meta data in programatically generated emails

[Auld Nick II]

Hi,

I work on an asp application that sends out emails to various people when certain events occur. There are a lot of emails sent out to a lot of people, they are bombarded with them and many of them will be irrellivant to most of the people so they want to be able to organise them using rules.

It's an html based email, it uses tables etc, so I can never be quite sure how the text is going to be formatted (can't rely on the width of table cells etc), so what I really want to do is add a hidden key/value pair so that users can set up hard and fast rules i.e. have something like 'ApplicationName:MSWord' in there so that not all emails with a reference to MSWord end up in the specified folder. I've tried using hidden form fields and meta tags in the html but it doesn't recognise this. Does anyone know a way that I could get round this, while ensuring that this info is not readable to the user (just to make it look nice)?

Cheers,

AuldNick

[Danial]

I am totally clear on this. I understand you are sending the email from your application. Are the user using your web based emial application to read the email, or are free to use any email client they choose?

If its they are using their own email client then your implementaion will be just a bit more difficult. If your user are using Outlook then it would be pretty easy to achieve.

Here is my suggestions.

1. Can you have the subject of the email as "Application:MSWord::Your other title"
User can uses the subject line to apply rules.

2. Hidden fields wont have, as most email client wont look at source. You could try adding some extra hidden text inside the body tag using CSS to hide the text.

3. Have a extra line with very small font(the smallest available) at the bottom of the email which can be used to apply the rule.


I would think the subject line would be the best way to go.

Hope this helps.

Danial

[Auld Nick II]

Thanks for that Danial, I've setteled for putting a paragraph with style = 'display:none', which works fine because all of my clients are using outlook.

Cheers,

AuldNick