Sometimes, after you register to receive a new newsletter, you start to receive much more spam than usual. You, naturally, suspect the newsletter provider can be using your data fraudulently, selling or renting your address in an illegal way. How you can tell if this is the case?

To find out, you can use a couple of not very well known tricks that GMail, the terrific free Webmail from Google, offers to you.

If you append the name of the newsletter provider -or any other identifier that makes sense to you- to your GMail user, using a '+' sign, the effect is that you still will receive the emails sent to this new address in your normal GMail account, but you can unequivocally identify the origin of the email thanks to this appended identifier.

So, let's say that you own the myname@gmail.com address and want to subscribe to a newsletter called 'My Pet today' or something. You can subscribe using your normal address plus an identifier, for example:

myname+MyPetToday@gmail.com

After doing this you will receive all the email from this provider in your normal account, but with the new identifier appended. In this way you can filter the incoming email and classify it accordingly. What is much better: if you start to receive email in this "artificial" account which is not from "My Pet Today", you can know for sure that they are using your account for sending you not solicited email and delete it automatically. Great!

Other interesting GMail idiosyncrasy is that it does not support dots ('.') in addresses. When one or more are added to a GMail address they are stripped out before delivered. Due to this behavior, all these addresses are equivalent:

yourname@gmail.com, your.name@gmail.com, y.o.u.r.name@gmail.com

and the like :-)

You can use this "feature" to distinguish between senders that don't accept the '+' sign in your email address and therefore make the previous tip useless.

Remember too that GMail has another alternative domain, googlemail.com, that is exactly the same as gmail.com. So, you can use myname@googlemail.com as an alternative address to receive important e-mail from sources you trust, friends, and so on, keeping the classic one (@gmail.com) for other purposes.

If you use gmail's incoming filters wisely you can easily get your important mail classified, your not wanted e-mail deleted and discern who is fooling you selling or renting your email address.

Hope this helps

JM

 

Hi Pablo,
We’ve got an animated Gif that we sold as an advertising banner in our newsletter, but our client has told us that the banner appears as ‘static’ when it is an animated gif.

¿Is there any problem with MAILCast?

This is a very usual query that I receive in our support system at Krasis. As it is very common I thought it would be a great idea to share it here as it was a FAQ (Frequently Asked Question).

Well, there isn’t any problem with MAILCast but with Outlook 2007, which shows animated GIFs as static GIFs. Remember: Outlook 2007 will only show the first frame of your animated GIF.

So, what can be done?

• Don’t use animated GIFs - uh, uuuh, clever! :-D (Also don’t use flash)
• If any animation is needed, upload it to a website and link it from the email.
• Whether the gif is banner, be sure that the first frame shows enough info to Outlook’s users.

And remember, do not abuse of images.

After my two posts about image formats and image dimensions for email, I’ve thought that you may be interested in a simple and free software to resize images. Not all the organizations need, can afford or know how to use a professional image editing software as Photoshop or Fireworks, so VSO Image resize will become a great tool for them.

It is a simple, usable, small but powerful tool to resize a picture or a complete folder with its batch mode. And it may be ran integrated with Internet Explorer.

Features:

• Convert between different graphic formats
• Configurable compression/resolution ratio
• Support file formats: Jpeg, gif, bmp, tiff etc
• Support Digital Camera RAW formats: Canon .CR2, Nikon .NEF , .MRW Minolta
• Handle single picture or batch mode
• Customizable templates for renaming files
• You can add your own watermark file
• Reduce size photos perfect for web publishing/share photos by email
• Integrate in windows explorer or works as a stand-alone application
• Fast processing
• Import directly from your memory cards
• Save history of destination folder
• Variable options and settings for advanced users
• Multilingual support
• Optimized for Windows 2000 / XP / Vista

Download link: VSO Image resize
I found it at Kabytes.

In my previous post, I wrote you about image formats recommended for web and e-mail and the recommended sizes for a faster download. Allright, but image dimensions will also affect to your file size, so take care abut it.

 You won’t need a 3000px width and 2mb image in your web (yes, I know that your new camera can take even bigger images, but believe me, you won’t need it!!!) A 200px width is enough for a small picture enclosed in your article.

Always change the dimensions with an image editing software as Photoshop, Fireworks,  Photopaint  or the Gimp (this one is Open Source and free!),  but don’t change it in your html editor (as Dreamweaver) because you will be changing just the representation size, not the file size.

In this image you can see some sizes in pixels over a real size grid to use as a guideline: 

Bonus: Tools to measure images in your browser

• Measure It: A Firefox ruler extension, the name tells everything abut it.
• Design: A bookmarklet by Allan Jardine, will help you measuring creating grids.

Frequently, unexperienced customers or prospects ask us about the possibility of sending mailing containing big attachments.

This is the kind of task that seems trivial when sending just a couple of e-mails, but that immediately reveals as a not-such-a-sensible-idea when viewed from the point of view of someone that sends thousands of e-mails.

First of all let's consider how long it will take to send out such a campaign. For example, we need to send 5,000 e-mails with a 5 MB attached .doc file. Let's do the numbers.

Attachments are encoded using Base64 (for sending binaries as text). This in average leads to an increase of 37% in the size of the attachment, so considering a total size of 5 MB (we consider content size as irrelevant here), the size when the email is sent will be:

5 x 1.37 = 6.85 MB

Now, we have 5,000 e-mails to send, so the total size of the information we need to transfer is:

5,000 x 6.85 MB = 34,250 MB --> 34.25 GB

This is equivalent to transferring 49 CD-ROMs through the wire!! (and we're not considering some extra synchronization traffic that is needed for the sake of simplicity).

If our server is placed in an advanced datacenter and has, for example, a 6 Mbps symmetric connection to the Internet (which is very good and is quite expensive), which is equivalent to 750 KB/sec (or 0,75 MB/sec), this implies a sending time of:

34,250 MB / 0.75 MB/sec = 45,666.67 seconds --> 12 hours, 41 minutes, 7 seconds

A regular 5.000 e-mailing will take around 4 minutes or less. Bufff!

Other important thing to consider is deliverability to the destination servers. If you send an e-mail with a big attachment to, let's say, a couple of accounts at hotmail.com, you probably will not have any problems. But, how many recipients can you have in your list with a hotmail e-mail account? 20%, 30%?. Probably more. Say hotmail, say yahoo, say one of your big customers in a B2B list. The point is that when a server sees a lot of big e-mails coming from the same IP, they usually block the sender because she is eating up a lot of their bandwidth. A lot of ISPs don’t have bandwidth enough to support getting a large number of emails with big attachments. So you probably will get a lot of deliverability problems if you do this.

Some recipients will have limited account storage, even in these times of almost unlimited account space. A lot of corporate servers limit the size of the incoming e-mails for their employees, so you get a chance or not getting them delivered and receive a lot of soft bounces (with more bandwidth usage in your server, by the way).

Even if you get to your recipient's inbox, if they don't know you well, you probably will get a lot of spam complaints or very low open rates for fear of getting a computer virus. Besides this, nobody likes to receive big e-mail attachments without being warned in advance.

There is an added benefit or not sending attachments: you can put files in your web server and add a direct link in your email to these files. This way you avoid the problems stated above and, as a plus, you get detailed information about which recipients clicked on it, getting very useful data that you cannot obtain from attached files.

We can allow you to send attached files in MAILCast, but we don't recommend it. Drop us a line to get a quote if you need this kind of service :-)

When using images in our email or web, we must take care about its size to ensure a fast download, even with the slowest connection speed.

But remember: don’t create emails which consist in just one image with all the information. Always insert text in your emails. Why? For two reasons: to avoid be considered as SPAM and to give some information to your recipient before downloading images, so, test your email without images to ensure that your message is comprenhensible and readable.

There are many image formats available, but only a few will work properly  on web and email. They differ in some important properties, and you should learn how to use them in the best way  to optimize your web or email size and weight, and get a higher download speed.

The first you must know is that there are two kinds of image compression, lossy and lossless.

Lossy compression means once you decompress the compressed data, you will not get the exact same image as the original (you lose information when compressing). However, this will only be visible at a closer look. Lossy compression is good for web and email because images use small amount of memory.

Lossless image: When you decompress a lossless image, you will get exactly the same image as the original. This compression uses greater amount of memory, so at times it may not be good for web, but for print.

Common image formats for web and email

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)

The extension for this  format  is .jpg (or sometimes .jpeg). This image type is lossy, and you
can control the compression level in image editors.

It is good for saving images with millions of colors, like photographs, drawings with shades, gradients, etc.

GIF

This format is a bitmap, which means it's a grid made of tiny pixel squares. Data about every pixel is saved (so it's lossless), and you can save up to 256 colors. Pixels may also be transparent. GIF may contain more than one frame, so it can be animated.

Since image programs can control the exact number or colors stored in a particular image, it is a good format for saving images with less colors, like charts, small graphics (bullets, buttons), images containing text and other important details, flat-color drawings etc.

PNG

This format was created to become a new and improved GIF, because GIF was
patented, and thus not free nowadays. PNG has greater color-depth than GIF, it can
store partial transparency, and can achieve greater compression. It gets the best from JPG and the best from GIF. Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 and less versions doesn’t support PNG transparency and a small hack is needed.

It's better to save images in this format when it's both needed to preserve transparency and large amount of colors, or partial transparency. Since it's a lossless format, these images are often not small enough for displaying on the web.

Image file sizes for web and e-mail

Which file size is recommended for images in web or email? Well, there’s not a specific rule but I recommend this as guideline:

Anyway. Before choosing which image format we need, whe  should  set properly image dimensions in pixels to get  an optimized image size. I’ll talk about it in the next article.

As you already know most of the current e-mail clients (either webmail or desktop) will disable the images in your e-mail by default. Unless your recipients decide to show images or to add you to their white list, images will not show in the screen.

This is a challenge for e-mail marketing design, because you must take this into account and create designs that work well even if images are not shown.

A quick way to test your creativity when images are turned off is to use a couple of web developer tools. In fact they are very similar, but you must choose one or the other depending on what is your browser of choice (Firefox or IE). This tools are very powerful and a must-have for every web developer. They both have a lot of features that I'm not going to describe now, but take my word for it and give them a try. I'll stick to the couple of things that will help you to test your designs.

If you're using Internet Explorer there is a tool called IE Developer Toolbar that you can download from here. When installed you it will show a small arrow icon in IE's toolbar:

If you click on it a small aditional window will appear at the bottom of IE's window with a lot of options. Search for the "Images" menu as shown:

If you disable images you will have an immediate feel of how your design will be shown in an email client with images turned off. You can even modify your HTML directly in the tool's window and see changes in real time.

A very similar tool is available for Firefox, and it is even easier to use. It's called "Web Developer" and you can download and install it from here. Once installed you get a wide toolbar just above the current webpage with a plethora of menus and buttons aimed at the web developer. The equivalent feature in this tool is located under the "Images" menu:

This has been just a quick tip on how to test your designs without images, but if you have HTML/CSS working knowledge and give both tools a try, as soon as you start to scratch the surface you will find fantastic features that will easy your work a lot.

If you’re interested in e-mail marketing, probably you’re also interested in web analytics. Remember that high quality traffic in your site is the first step to build a great database for your newsletter.

Google analytics, one of the best  free web analytics systems, has recently added a new optional feature (currently in beta): benchmarking. Now you can share your analytics (remaining anonymous) and benchmark your site with the rest of your competitors:

From Analytics Blog:

Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.

How to activate it: Click on “Benchmarking”  in the section “Visitors” and go!.

Congratulations!  You’ve got your new MAILCast Channel and attached or uploaded your database, and now? What? Come on, send you first campaing or newsletter. There are up to three ways to compose an e-mail in MAILCast:

1. Composing it from scratch
   
   

   Go to “Channels customization>Change this channel's template and signature” and be sure than the checkbox “Automated format” is unchecked and Save it.

    

   

   Then, click on “Compose and Send” , choose your channel and select “Create content from scratch”.

   

   Finally click on “Next” to create your e-mail.

   
   
   

2. Composing it with an automated layout template

   
   

   Go to “Channels customization>Change this channel's template and signature” and be sure than the checkbox “Automated format” is checked.

   

   Then, choose a template, write your e-mail signature (optional but we recommend it) and Save it.  Now, when you go to “Compose and Send” (and select your channel) you will see automatically collected your news that you've created in the section “News” , just write an introduction to your newsletter and send  or schedule it.

   
   
   

3. Uploading your email into a zip file

   
   

   Go to “Channels customization>Change this channel's template and signature” and be sure than the checkbox “Automated format” is unchecked and Save it.

   

   Then, click on “Compose and Send” , select your channel and “Create from previous content” and choose the zip file from your computer.

   

   The best way to create the e-mail is putting together the html file and the folder containing  the images, and then zip them at the same time. But be careful, the zip file must be 500Kb at least and the html file ought to be in the root or you’ll get back an error when uploading . The file may be “.htm” or “.html”, no special name is required (also the folder doesn’t need any special name).
   So you can use your favourite html editor (as Dreamweaver) to create your mail, and use the MAILCast’s editor just to correct something if is necessary.

Remember that you can create or order us your customized automated template. We are also able to desing your personalized e-mail for your marketing campaigns. Ask fot this service to our customer service.

Note: this month has been one of the busiest I’ve had in the last two years. It’s been very hard on work and that’s the reason I’ve not been posting as frequently as I’d like. In fact, next week will be worse because I’m a speaker at the Microsoft’s worldwide presentation event of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, so I will be travelling for the whole week. I hope that I can post something however. At least I’ll try my best. :-)

This is a little bit technical post, but if you follow the steps one by one it will be easy to put into practice. Let’s go!

Sometimes you’re not able to deliver a message to a recipient and you get some strange code from your Outlook (or the e-mail client you normally use) or, simply, get your e-mail bounced back. What everybody generally does is call her system administrators in search of help. But you will earn a lot of time and knowledge if you can find the problem by yourself (and you’ll save your busy sys-admin some health too) . Let’s find out how to do it...

Open your command line tool typing “cmd” in your Start·Run menu:

The first thing we’re going to do is check what are the servers responsible for handling e-mail for the problematic recipient.

The destination domain is just the text after the '@' of your recipient’s e-mail address, so that if it is johndoe@yourcustomer.com, the domain would be yourcustomer.com. Type the following command in the command line window:

nslookup –type=mx recipientsdomain.com

using the correct domain. You will see something like this:

The information you get that starts with the text ‘MX’ (short for Mail eXchanger) indicates the server responsible for handling the e-mail of the domain. In big domains usually there are more than one of them, but you should normally check only against the one with the 10 preference, as indicated.

OK, now that we know the server we must check, it’s time to connect to it. In the command line type the following:

telnet mail.yourcustomer.com 25

using the server you’ve just found out.

25 is the standard port for e-mail communication. If the server is up (and your connection too) you’ll see something that starts by the number ‘250’ (which means ‘this is OK’), like this:

If there is not a connection with the server you’ll get an error:

And you then will know that the reason of your problems is that the server is not working at all.

If you succeed it’s time to check the validity of the e-mail account. Type the word ‘ehlo’ following the domain name of the sender e-mail address. You’ll get a series of 250 acknowledge messages:

Now type 'mail from:' using the sender e-mail between ‘<’ and ‘>’ signs:

Next type ‘rcpt to:’ with the recipient’s e-mail address in this server. If the e-mail address exists and is willing to receive your email you’ll see something like this:

This will mean that, in this moment, there is not any problem with the recipient’s e-mail so you can retry the sending now.

But if there is a problem with the e-mail -which is very probable and that’s the reason you started all this stuff in the first place- you will get an error code (a number not ‘250’) and a message telling you the which the problem is all about. For example, if the e-mail address no longer exits you’ll get:

That’s all. You have diagnosed the problem by yourself and will be the super-geek hero of your office :-)

Don’t forget to type ‘quit’ to exit the telnet program before leaving. And never mind: if the address is OK your recipient will not receive any message from you and will never know that you have made this check procedure.

A professional e-mail marketing program such as MAILCast will offer you detailed information about the cause for some mails to bounce back, but if you are just sending a small bunch of e-mails from your “normal” e-mail client, with this technique you can found the main cause by yourself.

Some of our customers had several offices in different states and countries. Or maybe they need to send e-mail addressed from each of their customer reps to the customers they are responsible of, so that everyone receives the email from the right person.

Apart from the main sender of the channel you're using to send your mailing, you can personalize the sender name and email address for each of your recipients with a little trick:

Just add two fields to the Access or Excel file that contains your recipients after uploading it to MAILCast. Name them: 'Sender' and 'SenderEMail' respectively (case insensitive).

When you start sending your mailing, each e-mail will be addressed from the address in the 'SenderEMail' field, and with the name contained in the 'Sender' field.

If any of them is NULL or empty (or invalid)  the default address or name for the current channel will be used instead.

You'll never miss the chance to communicate from the right source again. And it's very easy to do :-)

Today I've been working in a small (just 97 lines of code) Excel VBA macro that can be somewhat useful. This utility allows you to split up columns of data that contain Names and Surnames mixed, so that you get two new columns with this elements separated.

It is able to correctly split names in several formats:

• Name and Surname. (for example: Zachery Barr)
• Name Initial Surname. (Stewart H. Shepherd)
• Two Names and a Surname (José Manuel Alarcón)
• Two Names and several Surnames (José Manuel Alarcón Aguín)

Download Name and LastName Splitter.xls (54 KB)

In order to use it you must enable the support for macros everytime you open it in Excel:

Press "Options", and select the "Enable this content" option:

Now just copy and paste your mixed data in any column in any sheet of this spreadsheet.

It's important that you select the range of cells you need to be processed for splitting. If you don't make any selection only the current cell will be processed.

Now go to the "View" ribbon in Excel 2007 (or Tools·Macros in previous versions) and press the "Macros" button or press ALT+F8, as it's shown below:

In the dialog that appears execute the macro "SplitCurrentColumn":

Now you will get another sheet named "Split" with two columns. In the first one you'll have the names and in the second the Lastnames.

You can process as many data columns as you want but take into account that the "Split" sheet will be emptied each time you execute the macro, so save your new data first. You cannot process data in the "Split" sheet which holds the results.

In the download I've included a sheet with sample data for you to try (300 randomly generated names).

Hope this helps!

A fast tip: Many people send massive e-mails using standard e-mail software such as Outlook. This is a mistake, and not just because the time it takes, but also because the danger of sendig  the recipient’s list  if you aren’t careful with the fields that you use.

To avoid this, when we are  writing an e-mail message we can specify the recipients in any of the 3 following fields:

• To: field recipients are the audience of the message
• CC: (Carbon Copy) Recipients added to this field  are others whom the author wishes to inform of the message
• BCC: (Blinded Carbon Copy) Field recipients will discreetly  receive the e-mail and won’t see any of the other addresses.

So, if you send a massive mail using ‘To’ or ‘CC’, you will show all the adresses to all the recipients whom may consider you as a spammer. And this is not the worst: you may be going against the law, because you are publishing personal data.
 
Click on ‘To:’ or ‘CC:’ button to sort the addresses between the three fields:

 
You can also enable ‘BCC:’ field in Outlook 2007 by clicking on ‘Options’->’Show BCC’:

Anyway, the best choice for massive mails  is a specialized software as MAILCast, which will help you to manage, and hide ;-), all the addresses while saving up time composing and sending your e-mail.

MAILCast, besides being able to maintain its own basic recipients lists,  allows you to upload any Access database or Excel spreadsheet containing data, that you can the use to send, customize and/or filter.

This VIDEO TIP shows you how you can easily create an Excel file to be used by MAILCast: