FIGURE C

Both Basic and Professional editions come with a lot of templates. Click picture for a larger image.

We'll talk more about the mail merge features of the Professional edition later in this review.

High Impact Email works primarily as a separate application that works in concert with Outlook, Outlook Express, and ACT!, the sales management tool. I'm reviewing this based on my experience using High Impact Email with Outlook 2003. High Impact Email installs a little button on your Outlook, as shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D

This button will launch High Impact Email from within Outlook.

When you launch the High Impact Email 3.0 application, you'll see a central control panel like that shown in Figure E.

FIGURE E

You have lots of easy options, all available from one central screen. Click picture for a larger image.

As you can see, there are a number of choices available, including creating a new message, viewing and browsing templates, managing profiles, your stationary, and if you're using the Professional edition, mail merge.

Getting ready for ReadyShare
You might have also noticed a button called Manage ReadyShare. That's where we're going next. But to do so, you need to understand a few things about how HTML email works. When you send an HTML email message, you're really sending a file containing HTML source code, which is all text. When Outlook or some other email client receives your message, it formats the HTML to look like a Web page.

The actual transmitted message does not, however, contain any pictures you might want to include in your message. That's because, with a limited number of highly technical exceptions, HTML email clients don't send images in messages. Instead, when you display an HTML message you've gotten, your mail client goes off and accesses a server, downloading any graphics (like a logo) that are to be displayed.

Normally, this is one of the more complex challenges to sending out your own HTML email messages. You've got to find some Web space (usually getting a hosting account), use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload the graphic to the server, get the exact URL pointing to the image, and embed that URL within an HTML IMG tag in your HTML message.

ReadyShare makes that whole process completely transparent. TemplateZone operates their own servers, and when you get High Impact Email 3.0, you get 250K worth of server space to store your images. In practice, that's probably ten to twenty small graphics, enough for a few logos, a picture, and maybe a signature. Rather than having to go through the whole FTP process described above, you just click the Manage Readyshare button, and upload your pictures through the simple wizard interface shown in Figure F.

FIGURE F

Just choose an image and click Next. Click picture for a larger image.

Once you choose the image, you can do some rudimentary processing to it. This is new in High Impact Email 3.0. As you can see in Figure G, I've selected a photograph, and I'm cropping it to just show the climber.

FIGURE G

Let's just upload the climber. Click picture for a larger image.

You can also adjust brightness, contrast, sharpness, and convert the image to grayscale. In this example, I decided I wanted to give the graphic a bit more punch, and increased the contrast by about half, as shown in Figure H.