Date: 06/26/07 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: html, web, google

This is driving me nuts, and I hope someone can help me. I've designed an HTML email newsletter. It's not overly image-laden, and all the images are optimized GIFs stored on a server and called by URL. I didn't get fancy with formatting - just used a background color in one of the td's, and some color and font stuff to differentiate between two levels of headlines.

The problem is, it's still 159K when it hits the inbox, and I can't understand why it's so large. I've streamlined as much as I know how. Now, here's the really weird part, I think. There's a newsletter I subscribe to that has a fairly similar design, but with a ton of images... and it regularly hits only about 40K in my inbox. So, as a test, I copied the source code from the latest edition of that newsletter, put it into a file on my computer, and sent the newsletter to myself. It showed up at 679K!

So apparently, there's some kind of compression happening somewhere when they send it out (or else Outlook Express is fattening when used as the sender).

What the heck am I missing here?

ETA: I have done exhaustive Google searches trying to find the answer to this question and have pored over every email newsletter design site I can find. All my efforts have come to naught.

X-posted to webdesign

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computergeeks/1084363.html