How to email MY blog posts from Outlook

This post is mostly for my own use; it updates a previous posting with the details of exactly how I am sending out the email version of these blog postings.

I am sending email copies of the technical postings to this blog to an email list of people at my work (I suppose I'd accept others also) who expressed interest. It started as a bonus goal project. Here is the process I came up with for sending the email from Outlook:

1. First, publish the blog entry to the web normally.
2. Launch Outlook
3. Go to "Tools > Options > Mail Format" and set the email format to HTML while disabling the use of Microsoft Word for editing emails.
4. Go to “View > Toolbars > Web” to enable the web toolbar.
5. Navitage to the website (http://mcherm.com/) and follow the link to the story to be emailed. Manually add "?stylesheet=outlook" to the end of the URL and hit return to view it.
6. Go to “Actions > Send Web Page by E-mail”. This will launch Outlook’s terrible, almost unusable HTML editor. The page will look entirely wrong - for instance, it will ignore the stylesheet. Fortunately, only one thing really has to be fixed (everything else will look OK when viewed. That one thing is to delete the first three characters at the beginning of the page. (Sometimes is messes up quotes too... you can check the body of the story.)
7. Now copy the mailing list and add it to the BCC field. Be sure it's the BCC field, not the CC or TO field, to protect the privacy of the message recipients.
8. Fix the email subject. It should read "Technical Essay Series: <title-of-article>".
9. Hit send.

Posted Mon 15 September 2008 by mcherm in Uncategorized