E-mail templates determine the look and feel and also the content or the body of the e-mail that goes out of Salesforce. One of the greatest abilities of the e-mail templates is to dynamically associate the data of a record with the e-mail that's flowing out of the Salesforce system.

E-mail templates are stored under public folders called unified folders, or your personal folder or a custom-created folder. For the time being, let's not worry too much about the folders and assume we are creating a new e-mail template from the unified public folder. You can create the e-mail template by navigating to Setup | Administration Setup | Communication Templates | Email Templates. There are basically four different types of options that we will see when we create an e-mail template.

The options are shown in the following screenshot:

We will be concentrating on how to make a quick HTML-based e-mail template. Please note that HTML templates are usually delivered by a design agency or the...