[Nyper]

Bare with me.. this may seem weird.

Our software (web-based) allows clients to design an email and send it out to their customers. We would like to further develop our software to allow customers to 'preview' what their email will look like using various email clients. In other words, we want to show them screenshots of what their email will look like when received by someone using Outlook, AOL, Eudora, etc.

Obviously this would be very easily to manually do. Download the email, take a screenshot, send it back to the customer. We can't afford that lapse in time.

Does anyone have any clue where to start? Just pretend our email is nothing but an HTML file. How can I have a prog automatically open it in using said email client and take a screenshot and submit it back? I prefer to do this all in .NET, so any links to other sights would be appreciated also.

Edited to Add:
My first thoughts on this are to launch a browser/program write a prog to move the mouse cursor & click exactly where I tell it to - essentially making the program click the necessary places to login to hotmail, etc... not having any luck accurately moving the cursor though.

[fitzjj]

if you are coding it all in html then just preview it by opening it in a web browser. Follow the HTML standards and everything will be fine - emal clients just parse the html in the same way that a web browser does.

[TheHeadFL]

I agree with fitzjj.

However what you are describing is so complicated and failure prone it borders on being impossible to pull off.

Go with what fitzjj suggests.