Radiant Core: email tag

Email Standards Project

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:40:00 GMT

We've always been big fans of the work of The Web Standards Project, tirelessly fighting for support from browser makers and encouraging web developers to jump on the standards train. Everything we do is fully standards compliant and we make every effort to keep our team up to date with industry best practises (and to innovate some of our own!), so it's no surprise that we're throwing the full weight of our support behind the new Email Standards Project. Launched in part by the fine folks at Freshview (makers of the awesome Campaign Monitor), their stated goal is:

The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

The fruits of their labour is already visible in things like the compliance reports for various email clients (Apple Mail [Excellent], Gmail [Poor], Outlook 2007 [Poor], and Windows Live Hotmail [Average] to name a few), and in their development of an email Acid Test to compliment The Web Standards Project web version. Standards make the world better for everyone, so if you work with email, read it, or send it (which should cover just about everyone who reads this blog), you should stop by their site and lend a hand.

Last Mile to the Inbox

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 08:30:00 GMT

One of the most common questions we get asked by clients, right behind the ones about getting more traffic to their site and about how we managed to hire so many uncommonly attractive people, is about how to get their newsletters to actually arrive in the intended recipients' inboxes, unscathed by spam filters. Our friends over at ThinData.com, a leading provider of email services, have posted a whitepaper called The Marketer's Guide to Successful Email Delivery. You'll have to fill in a quick form to register to receive it, after which an email will magically wing its way into your inbox which contains a top secret download link. It seems like an excessive number of steps to take, but its well worth it if you do any email-based marketing and would like to take some precautions to make sure people are reading your stuff. Among other things, it covers the five Challenges to Successful Delivery, along with five Best Practices to negate them:

Making Sure Email Can Be Authenticated
Maintaing a Good Email Reputation
Preventing Being Labelled as a Spammer by Recipients
Preventing Being Labelled as a Spammer by Third Parties
Configuring Email Servers to Meet Industry Standards

Highly recommended light summer reading - get to it!

Flash in Email

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:39:00 GMT

The folks over at Campaign Monitor, who sure know their email, have an excellent summary that answers a question we get all the time: can we put Flash in our email newsletters?

The short answer: no.

But since most clients won't just take no for an answer, they went and did some comprehensive testing across a number of different email clients and the results, as they say, definitely speak for themselves.

(Hat tip to the legendary joncoe for pointing us to their blog post)

Why we have privacy regulations

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 23:35:00 GMT

Some time ago - towards the middle of March judging by my email archive - we contacted the makers of a Mac OS development application to enquire about snagging a demo. We sometimes need to create some fairly complex UML diagrams and OmniGraffle just wasn't cutting it anymore, so we took a quick Google trip and find the antagonists of this little tale. I won't name names, but suffice it to say that we chose not to try out their demo when informed that we had to buy it for $40. Even as a small percentage of the purchase price of their software, being made to pay for the privilege of trying someone else's product runs contrary to many of my beliefs about how the world should work.

So, no real harm done. One potential sale lost and we moved on (though we still haven't found a decent UML package - any advice?). Then all of a sudden today - mere hours ago - a newsletter from said software company lands in my inbox. Given how unimpressed we were at being asked to fork out for a demo, we certainly never subscribed to a newsletter.

More to the point, it's actually illegal. Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) regulations specifically prohibits contacting people for a purpose other than the one you originally collected their information for - i.e.: exchanging emails with someone doesn't give you permission to add them to your mailing list. We spend a fair bit of time working with our clients to make sure that their sites conform to PIPEDA (which is more strict than equivalent US regulations if I understand correctly), not only because it's important to treat your clients with respect, but because it's the law.

Addendum (June 7th, 2006): in all fairness to the unnamed, privacy fouling miscreants, their newsletter did include an obvious unsubscribe address. No confirmation came back, of course, so I suppose it's the "I'm unsubscribed until I'm not" game. One baby step forward.