Tagged: email

Testing your HTML email campaign

If you create a lot of HTML emails, you surely spend a lot of time making sure those emails look as good as they possibly can no matter what email client the end-user might have. But you can’t possibly test for them all. Thankfully there is Litmus.

Litmus

Send Litmus a copy of your email design, either by uploading the HTML or sending a test email. Within a couple of minutes you’ll see screenshots of your email as it’s rendered by all the different email clients. It couldn’t be easier.

To be clear, Litmus is a professional service; it’s not for the casual user. Litmus costs a minimum of $49 per month for the basic service, and goes up to $300 per month for the premium. It sounds expensive, even at the low end, but I don’t know of any professional digital design firms that don’t use Litmus (or a similar service).

Last chance to save on web hosting

HostMonsterNow through Cyber-Monday, HostMonster is offering a discount of $1 off per month of their already low monthly rate for quality web hosting.

For only $3.95 per month, you get everything you need for hosting your website. I’ve been using HostMonster for many years for all the websites I manage, and I’ve been extremely pleased.

HostMonster’s standard plan includes:

  • UNLIMITED Space & Bandwidth
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As I said, I’ve been using HostMonster for years, and am quite happy with their service. I can’t recall my site or email service every being interrupted, other than pre-scheduled downtime in the middle of the night one or two nights per year. If you choose to use HostMonster for your web hosting, I would appreciate you using the links in this article. I do receive a minor commission from each sale when you use the links.

Email client marketshare: Infographic

email client marketshare infographic

With 10% marketshare, the iPhone outpaces OS X's Mail for reading email

Litmus, a company that tracks email campaigns, has published a report that shows where people are viewing their email. Not surprisingly, Outlook leads the way with 37%. The interesting factor is that mobile email has jumped from 7% to 15%.

Litmus put together a great infographic to display the results of their tests. It’s important for designers and campaign managers to know how their clients are reading their email, because it directly affects the technical aspects of the email design.

How to quickly delete emails on your iPhone

iPhone 4My first problem is that I get a lot of email. My second problem is that I check my email throughout the day on my iPhone. And my third problem is that I often wish to delete emails without even reading them (thanks to spammers with no grasp of the English language, and horrible PR firms who can’t target the proper sites for their stories in the subject line).

Thankfully Apple has made a simple-to-use email app for the iPhone that works wonderfully for most users, and provides a simple solution to my third problem.

In fact, it may be a little too simple. I’ve yet to run into a single iPhone user that realized you could quickly delete emails without actually opening the email simply by swiping your finger across the email in the list. This will summon a Delete button for just that email.

If you check your Gmail account from within the built-in email app, you can set this swiping action to delete or archive emails.

Easily open emails containing “winmail.dat” attachments in Mac OS X

If you’ve ever received an email that is nothing more than an email with an attachment named winmail.dat, you’ve no doubt been frustrated. Thankfully, there are two utilities you can download for free that can help you read these files.

If you’re not familiar with winmail.dat files, they are simply emails sent from Windows users running Microsoft Outlook via an Exchange server who composed the email using RichText.

MailRaider

MailRaider can extract the text and images in that winmail.dat email attachment

MailRaider from 45 RPM Software, and TNEF’s Enough by Josh Jacob are both stand-alone utilities you can use to easily extract the RichText file and any images they may contain.

Both utilities worked perfectly for me running under Mac OS X Lion, as well as Snow Leopard.

The Graphic Mac Link Box #5

The Graphic Mac Link BoxA collection of interesting or otherwise helpful links I’ve come across recently that you may not have seen:

9 Things you should do after installing OS X Lion
No operating system is perfect, though. At least, not for everyone, and especially not right out of the (non-existent) box. Looking to make your Lion experience that much better, we’ve bundled together a bevy of tips and tricks that you really ought to have ready on your first trip into the new OS.

What Potential Impact Can HTML5 Have on SEO?
How might HTML5 change the way we approach SEO? What are the possible impacts of HTML5 in search engine algorithms? A few questions answered in this informative article.

10 Free Slab Serif Fonts
You can never have too many fonts available. This is a small, but nice collection.

Instaport for Instagram
A simple way to export all your Instagram photos to other social services or your local hard drive.

40 High-Quality InDesign Tutorials
New to Adobe InDesign? DesignMag has a great collection of informative tutorials to help you learn the ins-and-outs of the most popular page layout and design application.

9 tips for emailing important people (clients)
Here are 9 top-notch tips for writing emails that make it as easy as possible for the recipient to send you a response.

AOL email still a spammer’s dream

Project Phoenix by AOL MailMost people who know their way around communicating on the web understand that most free email services result in receiving unwanted email (spam).

Over the years, two services have become well known for being major targets for spammers, Microsoft’s Hotmail and AOL. A few months ago I received an invite to beta test AOL’s latest webmail update, codenamed Project Phoenix, and decided to give it a try. My findings were pretty much what I expected. Unfortunately.
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The Graphic Mac Link Box #1

The Graphic Mac Link BoxA collection of interesting or otherwise helpful links I’ve come across recently that you may not have seen:

You can’t replace email if you require email

You can’t replace pants with shorts when your definition of shorts is: everyone buy pants and cut the legs off . That’s the premise behind this article which points out the shortcomings of current web services.

iMac (early 2011) benchmark results

Macworld published benchmarks of the new iMacs shortly after they were released, using Speedmark test results. Though they were impressive, Primate Labs released their own test results based on Geekbench testing and found the new iMacs to be even more impressive than we thought. You can also download a copy of Geekbench for free to test your current Mac and compare the results.

OS X and the death of the scrollbar

GigaOm mourns the death of the scrollbar in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Flipping your scrollwheel down to move up may take some getting used to when Lion ships later this summer. Thankfully Apple has offered an option to switch it back to the way Macs currently work. But is this change to the OS a sign of things to come?

Listen to Mac OS X Lion’s amazing new text-to-speech voices

MacOSXDaily has posted a few samples of the new voices that will appear in Lion when it ships. For those who live in the UK, you’ll appreciate Serena’s British accent. The quality of the voices is a huge improvement over the current Snow Leopard voices offered.

100 Principles for designing logos

Who would have thought that there were at least 100 different things to consider when building a brand? Apparently there are. I’m not sure anyone considers all of these when designing a logo, but it does give you a lot to think about, and perhaps helps guide your decision-making process.