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We mentioned a few months back that the Hotmail folks were about to launch a very cool new feature that allowed your recipients to unsubscribe directly from the Hotmail interface. As you know, if a subscriber no longer wants to hear from you they've got 2 options - mark it as spam or try and find the unsubscribe link.

This new feature goes a long way towards reducing false positive spam complaints by encouraging your recipients to take the unsubscribe option instead. If you've ever recieved spam complaints from your Hotmail recipients, you'll know just how important this is. Here's what your Hotmail recipients will now see:

When your subscriber clicks the unsubscribe link, they'll be redirected to your unsubscribe confirmation page, just like they would if they clicked the regular unsubscribe link in your email content. The best part is, you don't need to do anything to set this up, it will work automatically for all your Hotmail recipients.

The unsubscribe option will be visible to every subscriber that's marked you as a safe sender (or added you to their contacts). Luckily this is a very easy process in the new Hotmail interface and is likely something a subscriber will do for any newsletters they subscribe to. Here's a quick screenshot of how this looks for all new senders.

The moment "Mark as safe" is clicked, the unsubscribe option will be available in any emails you send them. Props need to go to Microsoft for being the first major ISP to implement this great standard.

Apologies for the short notice, but we'll be taking the Campaign Monitor application offline for a total of 8 hours between 8.30pm this Saturday night and 4.30am Sunday morning (US Central time - see this in your own time zone) to make some key hardware upgrades and add some additional layers of redundancy to both Campaign Monitor and MailBuild.

Don't worry, the maintenance will have zero impact on your subscribe forms or campaign tracking, everything will purr along as usual - you just won't be able to log into your account. If you've scheduled any campaigns to be delivered in this time-frame, they'll be sent as soon as the application is back online.

Update: The updates have been completed successfully and as of 12.30am we're back online. Thanks for your patience everyone.

Our email marketing tees have been way more popular then we ever hoped. We've sold loads through the site, and also given plenty away to customers doing great design work or helping out in our forums. Taking the advice of the one and only Kathy Sierra, we've just added some sample shots of our awesome new ladies sizes.

The ladies tees are available from extra small through extra large and also feature a new colour scheme for the "I'm Single" design. If you're an Aussie heading to the Web Directions conference later this month, we'll also be giving loads away at the event (among other things), so make sure you swing by our booth and grab a free tee in your size.

When you make a business call, you don't just launch right into the conversation without introducing yourself, right? Instead you say something like "Hi, I'm Mathew, we met at the Widget Summit and you asked me to give you a call". You should do just the same with your email newsletters.

Over at Clickz, Stefan Pollard has a great article titled "There's No Excuse for Trust Abuse", about doing permission reminders the right way. His point is that a vague permission message — "your address was subscribed to our list" — can be even worse than none at all. It makes you seem lazy and possibly suspicious. Your message needs to be as specific as possible, to help people remember how they actually did ask for your emails. This is particularly important for lists that grow regularly, as new subscribers have no background of newsletters to remember you by.

A great technique to make your reminder messages more specific is to keep track of exactly where addresses came from, and refer directly to that.

You are receiving this email because you gave us your address at the Widget Summit in September.

Or perhaps

You are receiving this email because you subscribed on our website to the Widget Newsletter.

With some smart use of custom fields, you can personalize that message for each subscriber. The first step is to keep track of where people came from. Create a custom field for your list called 'source' or similar. Now you need to fill in a value for 'source' for each person. If you are importing a file of new subscribers after a tradeshow, use 'gave us your address at the Widget Summit in September' as the source column for each subscriber record.

For your online subscribe forms, make sure you have a hidden 'source' field prefilled with 'subscribed on our website' as the value, so that each time someone signs up using the form, the right value is set (check out our step-by-step guide to do this).

Now in your campaigns, you can just insert something like this:

You are receiving this email because you [source]. If you are no longer interested, you can <unsubscribe>unsubscribe instantly</unsubscribe>.

It's that easy. Now your permission reminder messages are much more specific, and they will be much more effective in showing people you are legitimate and serious about having their permission. You can also use that same source information to start segmenting your list and offering different things to different groups.

Even though permission is not enough anymore, an accurate, specific permission reminder will go a long way to avoiding spam complaints, and help build up trust with your subscribers.