HELLO,
There are 2 parts to this project, viz. Creating HTML email and Sending HTML email. Let me outline a brief solution for your task.
CREATING HTML EMAIL MESSAGE
Creating the message itself having HTML body requires a THOROUGH UNDERSTANDING OF VARIOUS EMAIL RELATED RFCs, mainly concerning MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). Further, it requires knowledge of variuos ENCODING SCHEMES, listed in RFCs, used for embedding images, sounds, etc. in the message body. I have an IN-DEPTH knowledge of the same. (If you wish, you can see a SOURCE of an email message to see how everything needs to be put together.)
Composing the HTML CONTENT of the message is also somewhat tricky in that one can send HTML email to a recipient who is viewing it in either WEBMAIL CLIENT like yahoo!mail in IE or in standard EMAIL CLIENT like Outlook / Outlook Express. The HTML email needs to be constructed so that it is clearly viewable in both. There are NO SCRIPTS, FORMS, EXTERNAL STYLE SHEETS, etc. allowed in HTML email. But Internal Style Sheets, embedded images, etc. can be definitely used to crete an ATTRACTIVE HTML email.
SENDING HTML EMAIL
For this, CDO (Collaboration Data Objects 2000) can be used. The benefits of using this are i) CDO is an INTEGRAL PART of Windows 2000 and onwards operating systems. Hence, it is NOT NECESSARY TO USE ANY 3RD PARTY COMPONENT. ii) CDO does not use any email client like Outlook, etc. Hence, there will not be any ugly messages like "A program is automatically trying..".
I have similar projects in CDO and internet emails and know UNDERLYING MECHANISMS THOROUGHLY AND IN-DEPTH. To clearify your doubts, I would like to SEND YOU A TEST HTML EMAIL and hence request an email address from you.
Kind Regards,
Tushar