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Tomorrow and Friday some of the Freshview team will be at Web Directions South in Sydney, running demos of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild, meeting customers new and old, and also giving away some great prizes.

We have a serious stack of t-shirts to give away (the t-shirts you all helped to design), and every person who actually wears one of our shirts will be in with a chance of winning the spanking new 24 inch iMac we'll be using at the conference.

The prize will be drawn on Friday, and someone will be going home with an awesome new computer (if you can prevent me from taking it first!). We'd love to meet any Campaign Monitor or MailBuild customers who are going to be there, so drop by and say hello. It's also your chance to make a personal plea for that feature you really need.

We look forward to seeing you there!

As I mentioned in my original call for standards support, "getting an email to display consistently in all of the popular email clients is by far the most frustrating part of the job". Our dedicated site for the push towards standards in email is coming along nicely, but we're also well aware that things won't be improving overnight.

To keep everyone sane in the mean time, we're putting the finishing touches on an awesome new feature that lets you do incredibly detailed design and spam testing with a single mouse click - all before you hit the send button. Here's a sneak peek at some of the cooler bits...

Screenshots in all the major email clients

See screenshots of exactly how your email will look in up to 18 of the most popular email clients like Outlook 2007, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Lotus Notes, AOL and many more.

Image blocking and preview panes included

As you know, most of the popular email clients sport image blocking and preview panes these days. Not only will we take screenshots of your design, but we'll take multiple versions with images on, images off and even how your design looks in the horizontal or vertical preview pane. You'll have every angle covered.

Your email tested against popular spam filters and firewalls

Instead of just scanning your content for "spammy words", we’ll pass your email through real spam filters and tell you exactly why you failed. On top of popular desktop spam filters, we’ll also run your email through a number of key spam firewalls - the gatekeepers for most ISP’s and large corporations.

Cheaper than doing it yourself

This new feature won't be free in your account, but will cost $10 (or 1,000 email credits) for each detailed report. This will include dozens of screenshots in all the major email clients and your email being run through a range of popular spam filters and firewalls. It isn't something you'll use for every campaign you send, but if you're working on a new design or making some big template changes, this is a great way to get piece of mind in minutes.

As we've explained before, proper email testing takes time. Serious time. We've got test accounts at all the major ISP's and have a few test machines to check different spam filters - we know how painful testing is. I've been playing around with this new feature internally for the last few weeks and I have to say, I'm never going back.

We're hoping to launch this some time in the next 2 weeks, and I'll post an update here as soon as it happens. If you're an Aussie heading to Web Directions tomorrow, make sure you swing by the Freshview booth for a sneak peek at this new feature in action.

Our recent MailBuild and Campaign Monitor demo movies have proved super popular, and have been a great way to introduce designers to the product. In the past, and particularly since we released our demos, we've had several requests for videos that Campaign Monitor and MailBuild customers can use to sell the concept of email marketing and their specific services to their own clients.

We're starting to plan out exactly how something like that could work, and we'd love to hear from you all about the most common questions your clients (and potential clients) have when you are selling email services to them.

Perhaps they want to know whether email marketing is worth spending money on, or why they should use a special service to do something they can do themselves. The idea is that we could produce a video that covers some of these key questions in an engaging way, and help you in your sales process.

Obviously these videos would never mention Campaign Monitor or MailBuild directly, so you can use them for your rebranded services. This is your chance to have a powerful marketing tool built for you, so please do leave us a comment below.

What questions do your clients have about email marketing and email newsletter services?

Since we launched the Campaign Monitor email design forums we've had over 350 people signup, and over 400 posts on the design and technical sides of HTML emails.

We like to highlight some of the interesting things going on over in the forums - here's some you might want to check out:

• What tools do you use to create your html emails?
• Gmail feature request - CSS in the head!
• Looking for designers - we send a lot of your potential customers to this page!

Are you a Flash developer (or do you know one?)

We don't have Flash developer skills here at Freshview, but we'd love to hear from any generous developers who have used the API to subscribe people with custom fields to a Campaign Monitor list. Check out Jason's post if you might be able to help.

Getting yourself registered for the forums is the work of a moment, so why not jump in and join us!

We announced our intent to create email standards and asked for your help with establishing a baseline for support. The response has been outstanding. We've heard from the web-design community—your help has been invaluable and we're ready to take action.

In the coming weeks we will be developing a website dedicated to this movement based on the consensus of those who participated. Upon going live we will announce it here on the Campaign Monitor blog, so keep your eyes peeled. We are working to finalize our acid test and will collect final data on how our suite of email clients performed. This will be the foundation for our call to email-client developers for standards support.

Again, thank you for your kind words of support and participation. Together we can make a difference for web designers who design/build emails and for those who receive them.

Onward…