People have been asking me time and time again on how do I create and send out the newsletters (in the past Lintux Newsletter, Weekly Picks, HaHaHaa), and each time I tell one, some else asks again. So I thought it would be in the best interest of all that I put this on my blog so that I can give the link to anyone who asks. Coming to the process it is a quite simple one, by the time you finish reading this you will be amazed at how simple it is!!!
To begin with you will have to create an HTML page with you content you want to send, for this you can use the tools of your liking. I personally use:
- ‘gedit’, an simple text editor to code the HTML content.
- ‘Firefox’ web browser to preview the HTML pages
- GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program for playing around with images.
Once you have an HTML page ready, you will require an email client through which you can send the page. I personally recommend ‘Mozilla Thunderbird’. Initially once you will require to configure the client to be able to receive and send mail. For this you would require an email service provider who provides SMTP/POP3 service. One of the good ones I use is GMail. Yahoo and Rediff do not provide this functionality in their free versions.
Once configured, just go to compose a new message (Ctrl+N) and in this window enter the ‘To’ and subject fields. Once this is done the focus will be in the message composition window, here goto Insert -> HTML and copy - paste the whole HTML code of the page you created initially. Thats it, just click the send button and you are done.
Here is an image of the final result of what I ended up doing:
