Flash Your E-mail

Perhaps the main reason this technology has not been used before is that when you are writing an email your Flash animation is not visible. It's there all right, but it's not visible. You can tell it's there because your mouse changes when it's over. You have to be careful not to delete it accidentally.

If your email program has a Preview mode you can see your Flash animation just as the receiver of your message will see it. If you don't have a Preview mode you can see it by saving the message in your Drafts folder, or by sending the email to yourself.

In order to ensure your Flash animation will not add to the loading time of your email or newsletter you have to save it to a server, and replace the name of your Flash movie with the path to the file on your server, in the Object and Embed code in your HTML Stationery file. The best place to save your animation is on your Web server. This way it is always accessible to anyone reading your email, and to you when you want to make changes. Images for JavaScript slide shows and gif animations are sourced the same way.

The rest is just creating your Flash animation so it streams smoothly at 56K, at a minimum, or even 28K if recipients of your message might be using slower modems. My personal opinion is that reading an email is not something people expect to take a long time to do, so they won't want to wait for your Flash to load before it plays, but there may be exceptions.

By looking at the code for the other Stationeries in your Stationery folder, you will easily be able to set the default size, color and typeface for your new Stationery, as well as margins. You can view and change the code for ny HTML file by opening it in a text editor like Notepad.

The technology has one drawback. If the recipient of your email is behind a large firewall, like at AOL, animations are filtered out and included as attachments. They won't see the animation unless they open the attachment. But, for most people, email just got a lot more fun.

Ken Lapp is the President of Standard Graphics Ltd., a Web design firm in Vancouver, Canada which specializes in Multimedia for Web Mail. For further information on Standard Graphics' custom animated E-mail stationery visit their FAQ page at http://www.standardgraphics.net/Pages/FAQsAboutAES.html, or contact Mr. Lapp directly at Ken@standardgraphics.net.