Send HTML Emails with Gmail and Google Docs

All popular email programs – from web-based Gmail and Yahoo! Mail to desktop-based Microsoft Outlook to the mail app on your mobile phone – are now HTML (or rich-text) capable. Thus, your email messages can have custom fonts, inline images, lists, tables and other formatting similar to a web page.

But there’s one little problem – how do you write an HTML email?

The built-in WYSIWYG editors, like the one shown above, offer basic functions for formatting text but there are things you cannot do. For instance, how do you insert a 3×5 table inside a Gmail message? Can you right-align an image and wrap text around it similar to Word?

All this is easily possible in HTML but since your email program won’t let your compose a message directly in HTML, you’re stuck.

There’s an alternative that uses Google Docs to send HTML mails from your Gmail account itself. It works for both Google Apps and regular Google Accounts.

First make a copy of this Google Docs sheet and then choose Gmail – > HTML Mail to authorize the sheet to send mails from your email account. Once authorized, choose GMail – > HTML Mail again and now you should see a form for sending mails. Fill in the various fields, write any HTML code in the Message field and hit send.

The Google Docs option internally uses Google App scripts (class GmailApp) and you can find the full source code under Tools – > Script Editor. So the next time you want to create a more professional-looking email newsletter that has tables and other complex formatting, you know where to go.