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It's been just over a month since we announced RSS to Email support in Campaign Monitor. The response since then has been crazy positive, with more than 125,000 RSS campaigns already delivered and some stunning custom RSS template designs starting to surface (we'll feature some of these here soon).

The one catch when we launched last month was that RSS to Email was only available for customers on monthly plans. It was pretty clear from the day we launched that our PAYG customers were keen to get in on some RSS action too, and so we immediately started working on making the feature available to everyone. Today I'm happy to announce that RSS to Email is now available for our PAYG customers too.

Making sure your subscribers don't miss out

Like any complex feature, there are always lots of small gotchas we need to be aware of when it comes to billing. For example, what happens if we try and send today's recurring RSS campaign for you, but you got a little carried away with your Apple obsession and the funds aren't available on your credit card? There are lots of reasons a charge might not be approved, but we wanted to give you a quick way to resolve these issues without forcing your subscribers to miss out on your daily goodness.

So, if a payment fails for some reason when sending a recurring RSS campaign for PAYG customers, we'll let you know immediately and give you a grace period to get to the bottom of it. We'll send you an email explaining exactly what happened, and if you manage to get that issue resolved within a time period (2 hours for daily, 4 for weekly and 12 for monthly), we'll automatically send the email for you.

If for some reason you can't get it sorted in the grace period, the next campaign we send will include any new content, plus the older content your subscribers would have missed because of the failed charge. There are lots of other contingencies our engineering and QA team feverishly tracked down (they really are awesome) - rest assured we'll do our best to handle things in an elegant manner.

A quick refresher

If you happened to miss the full announcement last month, here's a quick demo video to give you an overview of what all the fuss is about...

This update is the perfect example of just how much we rely on your feedback to drive where we take Campaign Monitor. Feedback via blog comments, tweets and personal emails started rolling in as soon as we launched RSS support, which made it very easy to prioritise and get it out the door as quickly as possible. We're always listening, so please, keep it coming.

Amongst the moving and shaking that's come with Gmail's 'new look' have been a couple of changes to how this email client handles background colors and images. To some of you this may be old news, but for many it may change the way you design for this notoriously finicky client. So here goes.

Gmail now supports background-image

Although it's but a small victory, it looks like Gmail has expanded its CSS support to encompass the background and background-image properties. This means that you can now define background images for elements like table cells and divs, leaving Hotmail, Outlook 2007+ and Lotus Notes as the only major clients that don't support what's a fairly fundamental CSS property. Thankfully, there's a hack for background images in Outlook 2007/2010, so it's up to you to make the call - do you design with background images in mind (and a fallback color)? Or play it safe?

Note that background-position and background-repeat are still not supported - only images, for now.

Background colors or images are now a must

With Gmail's new themes (which I have to admit, are very pretty), have been changes to how email newsletters appear in the preview pane. With themes activated, the preview pane is actually semi-transparent, allowing the theme to show through. The only way to fix this is to nest your design in a full-width table, for example <table width="100%" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" ... >, thus providing an opaque background for your content. Pictured is an example of content inside and outside of a table with a background color, as seen in Gmail's themed inbox.

Many thanks to Responsys for their post, 'Workaround for Gmail Background Translucency' and our keen customers who wrote in about background image support. If you've seen any news and notable changes in Gmail, or have your own tip for working with backgrounds, be sure to let us know in the comments below.

Just last week, our blog post on 'Improving the usability of email subscribe forms on mobile devices' gained quite a bit of interest. But what was particularly gratifying to us was seeing some of its lessons being put into action - by an upcoming Campaign Monitor rebrand, no less!

Cool customer Elliot Ross (of Email Design Review fame) recently took a responsive approach to designing the pre-launch page for Action Rocket, a new email design studio. What makes the page unique is how gracefully it adapts for use on mobile devices (pictured), courtesy of our little form template.

Email form validation with CSS3

Scaling for the small screen aside, this email subscribe form has two features that considerably improve its usability, both of which were achieved by using input type="email" on the Email: field. First of all, using the attribute, type="email" results in the special, email address-specific keyboard being displayed on iOS devices. But secondly, it means that the :invalid CSS3 pseudo-class can be used to highlight the field if it doesn't validate properly. Here's a sample of the CSS code used:

In times past, developers have long had to roll-their-own client-side validation using JavaScript, but with CSS3, all it takes is a snippet of code. Find out more about form validation on A List Apart's 'Forward Thinking Form Validation'.

Taking pre-launch pages to the next level

We've previously covered how to build basic pre-launch pages and add social sharing to them. With smart phones becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it makes a lot of sense to go the next step and make the email subscribe forms therein as mobile-friendly as they can be - we've even provided the code to help you get started.

Besides, what's a better way to show clients that you understand responsive design, than to create a responsive site?

Many thanks to Elliot and Action Rocket for sharing this great example with us. If you have a great tip or hack for improving the usability of your forms, be sure to let us know.