My company just started doing a monthly e-newsletter named "BBDO AsiaNews" and I just finished working on our second issue last Friday. I work with colleagues, Jörg Dietzel, who manages the whole project and does most of the copywriting, and Paul Lau, who does most of the coordination and gathering of material. My job in the project is the most laborious (I'm pretty sure!). I have to layout and format the newsletter in HTML (separate email and Web versions!), go through numerous last-minute revisions, test the newsletter on various email clients, scale pictures (of our print work) into standard resolutions, convert videos (of our TV commercials) into Windows Media and QuickTime formats, load our work (using FTP and browser configuration) into a Gallery-based Web album (thanks to Jörg for handling the captions!), manage the list of addresses, and finally send the darned thing out! The little details are what's so time-consuming and tedious. All in all though, when the newsletter goes out, it's extremely satisfying!
Oh, the difference between the email and Web versions, is that for the Web version all mailto: links are specially encoded (using the free Enkoder for Mac OS X) to prevent "spambots" from harvesting email addresses off our Web pages. Also, for the email version, in the intro, we have a little note with a link to our Web version for our recipients whose email client doesn't render HTML email very well (e.g. Lotus Notes users).
If you're interested, here are our first 2 BBDO AsiaNews newsletters:
Yes, this last issue, we just barely made the deadline!
I should also note that for Issue 1, I formatted the newsletter in Microsoft Word 2000 (with a bit of hand-editing using BBEdit on my Mac). The HTML code that Word produced was far from optimal — included a lot of Microsoft/Word-specific stuff). I did Issue 2 in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and the results were far better all around — "cleaner" code and better typographic control using CSS. In Issue 2's email version, all graphics (and the CSS stylesheet) were Web-based links (better because the email is smaller) whereas with Issue 1's, a GIF picture was embedded in the message itself.