Outlook: Bookmarks in HTML Messages

How can I include bookmarks in an HTML message, such as in a newsletter in which people click on a link at the top of the item to go to a particular section farther down?

You can use the same mechanism that you use on Web pages: Put an tag at the beginning of each section to set a bookmark and create hyperlinks at the top of the message to link to the sections. The trick is that Outlook provides no easy way to edit your HTML source code directly. If you're using Microsoft Word (i.e., WordMail) as your editor in either Outlook 2002 or Outlook 2000, you can choose Insert, Bookmark and Insert, Hyperlink. Create the bookmarks first so that they'll be available when you create the hyperlinks.

Another method is to use an HTML page as Outlook stationery. To do so, follow these steps:

To use your stationery to create a message in Outlook, choose Actions, New Message Using and select either the name of your stationery or, if you don't see it, More Stationery.

These methods are the only two reliable techniques I've found for sending bookmarks. For many simple Web pages, choosing File, Send, Page by E-mail in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) will work, but in my tests of pages with bookmarks, IE attached the page as a file, rather than inserting the HTML content into the mail message. I also tried choosing Insert, File command in Outlook, and selecting the option to Insert as Text. In this case, though, Outlook changed the links so that they no longer pointed to the bookmarks.

If you choose to use WordMail in Outlook 2000, choose Tools, Options, and on the General tab, click E-mail Options. On the General tab of the E-mail Options dialog box, select the Filter before sending check box. This option will reduce the amount of formatting code that WordMail sends with the item.