Whether the PDF would come into your mailbox or not and how it would be seen is dependent on several factors:
- Some email clients such as Apple's Mail will automatically open and display the PDF attachment, if it is one page or less in length. Other email clients will only show the attachment icon which must be opened to view the file.
- As has already been mentioned some users will not accept attachments at all out of fear they contain some sort of malware
- Corporate and institutional firewalls can make sending attachments problematic
- Some ISPs have a strict limit on the size of attachments so that could be a problem with your newsletter being as long and as complex as it is.
What I was proposing would not have any attachments, rather it would be a one page rich text (HTML) message that would be the introduction to your newsletter. An attention grabber enticing the reader to click on a link(s) to view the actual content of the newsletter through their web browser. That content would be on the web in either HTML or PDF format. As I said before there is no foolproof solution and I see two possible glitches with this scenario. But both of these are present in your present scenario as well.
- The introduction email must be well crafted to create a desire in your reader to click through to see the content of the newsletter. But that is also true of your present scheme if you want the reader to go beyond the first screen without hitting either the delete or junk mail buttons
- If the recipient has their email client set to not show rich text making your email "grabber" even more difficult to craft attractively.
An additional advantage of getting the reader to click through the email to your web site files would be the ability to gather accurate statistics on how many of your subscribers are actually looking at the content of your newsletter.
