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In Message Studio 4.0, users now have the ability to easily upload all of their HTML and image files all at once. The new Media Server feature will unpack the zipped files and automatically publish all of the images to StrongMail media servers or third-party servers so that when recipients get a message, the images will be served from the specified location.

The HTML template can also contain absolute (src="http://www.myserver.com/images/2008/picture.gif") or relative (src="images/picture.gif") paths for images. When the template is uploaded, Message Studio will scan the code for all image references. For any images that have relative paths, Message Studio will automatically convert the path to point to the specified image server.

To get started with using the media server in Message Studio 4.0, all you have to do is go to the Administration module in the left navigation panel and create connections to internal or external media servers. You can leverage the StrongMail tracking server (either on-board or off-board) as a media server or you can use a third-party server to host your images. In addition, you can set up a group of servers as a single media server for use with a load balancer.

When you set up a media server, you can designate the server as either writable or read-only. With a writable media server, when you upload a zip file with the HTML and images in it, Message Studio will upload the images into a temporary folder until you specify the media server. If you create a connection to a read-only media server, you must upload images directly to the media server outside of the Message Studio interface. If the media server configuration includes multiple servers, Message Studio will upload the file to each server.

Once you’ve set up a media server configuration in Message Studio, you can upload a zip file (containing images and a single HTML template) or an HTML template that includes image references on the Template import screen. Once you specify the media server the template should use, Message Studio will automatically update any relative image links within your HTML template to reflect the media server URL that you specified during set up.

That's it.

Now, when you preview the email template during mailing setup or when you launch the mailing and recipients view the email, the images in the template will be served by the media server.