How to create HTML-emails with Microsoft Access and

Outlook automation

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Published: June 15th 2015

This article describes how to create an

html email from your Microsoft Access
application, how to add CSS formatting
and include inline images in the email.

You need to have Microsoft Outlook

2007 (or newer) installed for the
sample to work. Outlook Express will
not work.

Creating the email message

The basic creation of the email is
similar to the code in my article
on how to create emails by Outlook
automation. You create an Outlook
application object, then create a
MailItem object, set the sender and
recipient addresses, and a subject.
This is essentially the same approach.
Here is the VBA code for this:
Instead of the normal plain text email
message, I showed in the original
sample, we will use an HTML-
formatted text as body. You can use
any HTML-editor to create the html
code of the body. If you are familiar
with HTML you can also use any plain
text editor, even Notepad will do. A
simple HTML text for our email could
look like this:

You could store the HTML text for the

email in a field in a table or in the text
file. The storage and retrieval of the
text is not subject of this article
therefore I will abstract this away and
just assume there is a function
GetHTMLText that returns the HTML as
a string. After we have created the
body of the email we have to indicate
that we want to send a HTML-email by
setting the BodyFormat-Property
accordingly and by setting the body of
the Mailitem. Other than for plain text
emails we need to use the HTMLBody-
Property.
We could now send the email, as in my
simple sample by using Mailitem.Send.

Formatting the email text

But I would like to go a bit deeper with
this sample and add some additional
formatting to the email. We could
simply use the formatting properties of
basic HTML like <font 
face=”Arial”><b>foo</b></font> to
create formatting. But this is
somewhat old fashioned and I would
rather discourage it because it creates
a tight coupling between individual
email text elements and their
formatting.

As in general web design, the better

way to do this is to use Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS). You can use CSS in email
as well. But as the support for CSS in
mail clients is not as extensive as in
most of the common web browsers,
you should check if the elements you
are using are supported by the most
common mail clients. Here is a
good matrix of supported CSS
elements in various email clients.

So instead of using the tightly bound

formatting in the individual HTML tags,
we add the CSS to the header of our
HTML body. I use the CSS class
attributes Header, Text and Footer in
the HTML tags to apply the formatting
to each of the blocks. I recommend you
store the CSS separately from your
emails text to keep text and layout to
itself and can more easily change each
without digging through the other. For
simplicity I will assume this sample
that our function GetHTMLText returns
the complete HTML including the CSS
of the header. The complete source of
our email could look like this now.
Now we have prettier looking HTML
email and again, we could send it right
now. - But wait there is more.

Including images in your HTML text

Sometimes you want an even prettier
email and add an image as well. There
are two ways to do this. The first one
is widely used and rather obvious. You
can put an image tag, like this <img 
src='http://someserver.invalid/Dummy
Barcode.jpg'> inside your html, which
points to an image on a publicly
available website.

This reduces the size of each email

that is send and received and it is can
be used to track the reading of the
email by the recipients as well. While
it is a huge advantage to be able to
track the open/reading-rate of your
email campaign, there are
disadvantages with this approach as
well.

Some people, me included, are sick of

their email reading being tracked and
hence configured their email client to
not display external images
automatically when reading an html
email. These people will not see your
image unless they explicitly download
it. The other obvious disadvantage is,
that the recipient will have to be
online not only to receive the email
but to read it as well. This is
undesirable in situations, where you
want the recipient to be able to view
the image any time he opens the email
whether he is online or not, especially
on mobile devices. A good example for
this is the QR-Code in a boarding pass
email for an airplane flight.

So I here want to focus on the other

option to include an image in your
HTML email text. This is embedding
the image as an attachment to the
email. Adding an attachment is fairly
easy. I included the single line of code
for that in my original sample. But it is
not that easy to use such an
attachment as an image within the
HTML body of the email.

To achieve this you need to add a MAPI

property to the attachment that is not
directly supported by the Outlook
object model. It is
the PR_ATTACH_CONTENT_ID. This ID
can be used as the image source in the
HTML-code of the body. To set this
MAPI property we need the SetProperty
Method of thePropertyAccessor-
Objectof the Attachment Object. The
schema used as the first parameter is
http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/
followed by the const “proptag” if you
use a predefined MAPI property and
finally the actual value of
PR_ATTACH_CONTENT_ID, which is
0x3712001F.

You can use any string as an CID for the

attachment, but it has to be unique
within your email. I usually use the file
name for it. It can then be referenced
in an img-Tag prefixed with the
string cid: in the HTML text like this.

Now we can finally send the email

formatted nicely with CSS and an
embedded image that will be available
right in the recipient’s inbox whenever
he reads our email.

This is how this email looks in my

inbox:
 Here is the full VBA source code to
send the email from Access.

Public Sub SendMail()

Dim myMail As Outlook.MailItem

Dim myOutlApp As Outlook.Application
Dim att As Outlook.Attachment

' Creating an Outlook-Instance and a new Mailitem

Set myOutlApp = New Outlook.Application
Set myMail = myOutlApp.CreateItem(olMailItem)

With myMail
' setting the recipient
.To = "someone@somewhere.invalid"

' defining a subject for the mail

.Subject = "An email with CSS formatting and embedded image
created by Outlook automation"

' Setting BodyFormat and body-text of the mail

.BodyFormat = olFormatHTML
.HTMLBody = GetHTMLText

' Adding an attachment from filesystem

Set att = .Attachments.Add("D:\tmp\DummyBarcode.jpg")
' Setting the PR_ATTACH_CONTENT_ID property to
"DummyBarcode.jpg"
att.PropertyAccessor.SetProperty
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x3712001F",
"DummyBarcode.jpg"

' sending the mail

.Send
' You can as well display the generated mail by calling the
Display-Method
' of the Mailitem and let the user send it manually later.
End With

' terminating the Outlook-Application instance

myOutlApp.Quit

' Destroy the object variables and free the memory

Set myMail = Nothing
Set myOutlApp = Nothing

End Sub

I hope you enjoyed reading this article

and it helps you to create more
advanced emails from within your
Access application.