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When you take a prescription drug, that's between you, your doctor and your pharmacist. No one else has a right to know.
Perhaps not for much longer.
Under legislation that quietly passed in the California Senate on May 29 (bill SB 1096) and is making its way through the Assembly, drugstores would be free to share patients' prescription records with companies that specialize in bulk mailings.
 The ostensible rationale for the data sharing is that it would help consumers by providing letters reminding people to take their medication or refill a prescription.
The reality, critics say, is that this is an effort by pharmaceutical companies to help ensure that patients stick with expensive name-brand drugs and not stray toward cheaper generic alternatives. It also could lead to privacy violations.
"Your private medical information is being transferred from one database to another", said Jerry Flanagan of Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog. "Once that genie's out of the bottle, it's very hard to get it back in". The've also launched a campaign for fighting against this bill.
The creator of this Senate Bill says it has been misunderstood by the public, and particularly by journalists who failed to grasp its finer points. Contrary to some reports, he said, it wouldn't allow drug companies to send you pitches for their medicines in an attempt to get patients to switch from one brand to another.
Oh my! :-(
Read the rest of this tremendously intricate plot involving politics, drug makers, money and online privacy at David Lazarus' Consumer Confidential Blog (Los Angeles Times).
What's your opinion?
Two out of three Internet users in the US has purchased products that they have been recommended through snail mail. Email is very popular too as a purchase recommendation tool.
That is one of the conclusions that arise from a recent study by eMarketer.
Among all the direct marketing channels email is the most accepted one among users only surpased by postal traditional mail. Un a 1 to 5 valoration scale, surveyed users give email 3.7 points. The rest of marketing channels, such as phone or instant messaging, get less than 3 points in teh survey.
News sent through social networks are not very effective. Just a mere 6% of the purchases were generated through this kind of communcation.
 Recently we've made a minor update to our MAILCast service that lets you use the new Office 2007 file formats for your mailing source data.
Now, you can upload files in .xlsx (Excel) or .accdb (Access) format when you need to update the source of mailing data for your channel. These formats join the classic .xls and .mdb file formats that we supported and that you can keep using if you will.
Hope this helps!
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.
About a month ago I wrote a post about buying lists in the Internet and why this was a bad idea.
 Today I received a question from one of our customers about renting a list and the convenience of doing this.
Rented lists are different from selling lists in that, in the first case, you don't get access to the data in the list but the provider sends your email on your behalf to its own list of recipients. You must trust a lot the provider or otherwise you can not be sure that the list has a good quality and the recipients have given permission for receiving this kind of e-mails.
Companies that grow lists for renting generally get their recipients from vertical portals or from some specific websites. Probably this people give permission to these portals to send them e-mail from them or their customers and partners, but think about the consequences of the owners of the list sending an e-mail on your behalf: The recipients will not know you and probably get annoyed and click the “report spam” button. And most important: they didn’t give you explicit permission to send them any e-mail.
Sounds this familiar to you? Yes, it's the definition of spam: unsolicited e-mail.
Does this mean that this against the law? Not necessarily, but the point here, as always, is not only if it’s against the law (that’s supposed to be), but if it is against your own interests.
You will probably pay a good bunch of bucks for using the list, and you are surely getting a real low response for the emailing, and therefore a small ROI from the investment. And worse, your brand could be damaged if people think you’re a spammer. You don’t have a clue if the list is heavily used and consequently people in the list are angry about receiving your e-mail.
So the conclusion in (again) that you must not rent lists for emailing.
If you really need to grow your subscriptions’ list fast you can try to advertise in a vertical portal newsletter, co-brand it or make co-registration. But renting or buying a list is always a bad thing to do.
As always, I recommend that you grow your own in-house permission list (some tips here and here). It’s slow and painful, but it’s the only way to get results. In e-mail marketing always think in quality, not in quantity (more is less), and don’t forget that the most important asset you have is your brand and reputation, so don’t get a chance to drive it to a dead end.
In case you don’t want to hear my advice please review this interesting article by Jeanne Jennings: “Renting E-Mail Lists: What to Ask Before the Send”, and the ten rules of thumb for rented lists of Marketing Sherpa.
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
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 :-)
 Very often we attach too many files in our emails without asking us if it was really necessary. In many occasions, the same information could be included in the message body or some other way shared by sender and receiver by clicking on a link inserted in the statement.
Although the possibility to attach a document in the email means a great advantage as a vehicle of information, also have a distinct disadvantage: their poor vision in a PDA, introducing virus into computers, making the e-mail as spam in server destination…
If it is really necessary to add an attachment, it is desirable to warn the recipient in the subject or in the body of the message about what is sent, so he decides whether or not opens the email
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