Send a Webpage will take any webpage published on the Internet and send it to your mailing list subscribers. Fairly powerful.
Send A Webpage functionality requires the LWP perl modules to be installed on your server. If your server does not have these modules, you can download and install them yourself. The LWP modules can be found on CPAN. Regrettably, they aren't the easiest of modules to install, having many dependencies and needing compilation.
Please test out the Send a Webpage functionality at least once per mailing before you send out your mailing list message. There are server setups that disallow a script/program to query a webpage that originates from the same server.
There is currently a known issue: the HTML Mailing List Message Template will not be applied successfully to mailing list messages created from the Send a Webpage screen. At the moment, it's suggested that you put things like the mailing list unsubscribe link inside the webpage itself.
The Subject of your message
There's a few things that can be done to images that appear in a webpage you want to send; we can simply change the URLs of all the images that are called to make sure that they are absolute - that they contain the full path to where they're located on your server, or we can actually embed the images in the mailing list message itself.
Embedding images in the mailing list message itself has the advantage of having those images always available to be viewed by your subscribers but, like all HTML email, it'll both take a little while to initially download the images, and then have the mail reader render your mailing list message. This may seem as a turnoff to your subscribers, so always create HTML email messages on the lean side.
There are two ways, internally, on how this can be down, by using what's called the, Content-Location header, or using the Content-Id header. In my tests using Apple's Mail.app, the Content-ID method seems to work slightly better, although YMMV.
If the webpage you want to use for your mailing list message is password protected, you can put in the username, password and proxy in this location. Most likely, this information will be transmitted in clear text.
Since Sending a webpage will create an HTML version of your mailing list message, it's a good idea to make a plain text version as well, or your subscribers that have mail readers that can't understand HTML will not be able to see your message.
Dada Mail is Free Software and is released under the Gnu
Public License.
Dada Mail is written in Perl because we love Perl.