Question

Does anyone know how well emails which contain a custom HTML message containing a tag sent out from MailChimp are handled by mailservers? Is it better to just have your images hosted on mailchimp rather than on your own host? Or is mailchimp better recognized/whitelisted by mailservers?

Answer 1

Turns out the best and most likely only logical solution to this is to host your images remotely (put an IMG tag into your HTML code of your email) on your own host or on Amazon CloudFront. Since cloudfront.net isn’t associated with your website then there is a better chance that most email providers and spam filters will have that domain whitelisted for displaying images inside of emails and therefore those images should show up fine. If you use your own domain name then you risk the chance of having your images blocked or hidden within HTML emails.

The other solution is to make a simple HTML file and create a directory and include that HTML file and it’s images. Then zip the HTML directory and have it be automatically uploaded to MailChimp each time a campaign is created on your website. Then MailChimp should break open the zip and create the campaign with the correct email message and host all your images on their own server. This should guarantee that the images are displayed properly and that they’re hosted on MailChimps domain and/or servers. The only trouble is that you need to have it uploaded each time you create a campaign and the API doesn’t support uploading them.