A step too far....

This was when some day before christmas this year. I tried on a new stuff. My goal was to send a new greeting card I did in Flash 8 to my friends. Last time I had sent them some images with my name hardcoded and got few requests, to remove my name from it so that they could forward it. So I had my idea so that anyone could reuse it.This time i wanted to implement this in my flash card.

So good of me, the Saint Intruder ?? Not really , that is just a marketing tool. I just want some publicity to my website. nothing I would gain from it though, but I love getting new visitors from places far and even mail :)

As ActiveX is not supported in email, it was virtualy impossible. But I broke through with help fo the HTML forms. I added a new page to my site www.mohanraj.net/greetings where I had an input form. You can enter your mail ID and your friends ID name and all stuff there, and it sends a mail to your friend with a 'click here to view your card'. This was not the one I wanted. Ideally I wanted my card there. The flashy one. BUt there was no way before me as flash was not loaded in email. This may be due to the security issues.


When your friend clicks in the link in email, it takes them to the greetings display page in my website (done in ASP)which also recieves the info about you and your friend to whom you have sent it. That is displayed in the greeting card.

Then you have a greeting card sent from your mail ID to you friends, where you have his/her and yours name dancing its ... so beautifully engraved.

oh... what a nice story. But this was not the thing that happened in hte real world.
I had a few mistakes from My part. May be I went too far adead of time to implement the Flash 8 based greeting card.

Problem no 1
I made use of all the filters and effects in flash 8. With the beautiful dropshadow and glow effects that are in no way visible , except in flash player 8, people without it would see just a blan red rectangle ! If I had published for flash player 7 or lower, they would have atleast seen their name and the greetings wordings !

And to add to that, it will take some time to load

Problem no 2
I made use of the form tags in hte HTML email I sent. If the user had seen it through an email client like MS Outlook or Outlook Epress or Mozilla Thunderbird,they wont be able to see the name from whom they had recieved the card. But those are present in the mail.

And more funny thing is , if they had disabled HTML mail or viewed the email in plain text mode, they could never see that! the mail looks like this :

Hello John Smith


Please do ensure that you have Macromedia Flash Player 8 installed! You
can get it from www.macromedia.com/go/getflash

- Mohan


Had I placed some alt text for the click ehre image, it would have been sensible!

Problem no 3
I had set the mail settings so that the email is recieved from hte sender directly, say you@yahoo.com send the mail to me@hotmail.com , the mail will be send as such. But it is using a mail server thats not from Yahoo.com !. So wat ? the mail will be treated as Junk by some, others like rediffmail, just ont accept it. As a result you cant send the mail to your friend@rediffmail.com. and your friend@yahoo.com will see the message, if he has a habit of seeing what all are there in the junkbox before he deletes it !


So there is still a long way to go to implement my version of flash card.
Is there anything to be taken as a Plus point in this ?
I dont feel so.

My sincere appologies to all of you whom i sent this.
Forgive me :D

Lets hope things will get beter by the New yr. Watch for it.

I promise

- No flash8
- No plain text email
- No mail server problem

for the new year edition