Fix the images in your RSS emails

For this site, and for many of my clients’ sites, I have set up a subscription to receive my posts by email. For this, I use a Mailchimp RSS campaign that checks my website’s post feed every day and then sends any new posts as an email to all subscribers.

The only issue with this is that the images lose their alignment setting when viewed in an email client. Take a look at the screenshot below of the email of my recent post. The image is to the left, the first line of text starts at the bottom right corner of the image without any padding.

This has been a bit of a bugbear to me and I’ve been eagerly awaiting the launch of a plugin that Robin Cornett and Gary Jones have been working on that will solve this issue.

The plugin is out now and is called Send Images to RSS and is free to download from the WordPress plugin directory. You just need to upload and install it on your website. There are some settings (in Settings -> Media -> RSS Feed) but it works well out of the box without altering them.

It works by changing the size of the images to a more email client-friendly size and adds the styles to the image to reflect those that you have chosen for your website – left, right, centre, etc.

I’ve installed the plugin on this site and my Mailchimp preview for my previous post now looks like this:

So much better!

You can find out more about the issue and Robin & Gary’s plugin in this post by Robin.