Blog: Observations & Answers

We're currently experiencing delivery problems to Hotmail recipients. We are currently working on solving this issue.

We recommend holding off on sending any campaigns to Hotmail recipients until further notice. We'll update this alert as soon as you're good to go. If you've got any questions, please let us know.

UPDATE 8/9: We've been directed to Symantec Brightmail as the source of the issue. We're currently in contact with Symantec trying to get to the bottom of the problem. More news here shortly...

UPDATE 12/9: We're good to go! You can send your campaigns to any accounts that may have experienced the problem, including Hotmail and other Symantec Brightmail protected accounts.

Thank you for your patience while we resolved this issue. However, by working together and ensuring that all campaigns are designed according to best practices, and by making sure our lists contain only recipients who have opted to receive contact from us, we can avoid experiencing this type of problem again. Our apologies again for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Since there are a wide variety of tools people use to read their email, it's a good idea to test your campaign in several different environments before you send it. The two main types of applications people use to read their email include desktop applications, such as Microsoft Outlook Express, and web based email such as Hotmail and Yahoo!. Each of these environments render HTML emails differently and should be tested for every campaign you send.

Desktop Email Applications

The most common desktop email applications include Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird for the PC. On the Mac, you should be testing with Mac Mail and, depending on your target audience, Eudora. To make testing more complicated, they all come in various versions across multiple platforms. The most common problem caused by desktop applications involves the images in an email not being displayed, so itís a good idea to check your campaign in at least a few of these applications.

Web Based Email

Many users also have email accounts through services such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. Using Hotmail as an example, when you view an email it is surrounded by various parts of the Hotmail interface, such as the navigation and banner ads. Some web based email accounts will even modify your email by removing any stylesheet elements you have included, so itís a good idea to check that your email will still be displayed appropriately despite these issues.

Here's a great article to check out on designing your emails for these different email environments.

The quickest way to test your campaign through Campaign Monitor is by using the Test Campaign Design tool, pictured above. This feature allows you to quickly send a preview of your campaign to any email address. If you want to send your test email to a number of addresses simultaneously, just separate them by a comma.

This feature also comes in handy for sending iterations of a design to a client for approval.

Nope. Sorry, but Campaign Monitor has been specifically built not to support attachments. We did this for a number of reasons.

1. We ensure that your campaigns are unable to send viruses that propagate through attachments.
2. You're not forcing an attachment down every recipients throat. Large attachments + slow connection = angry subscriber.

If you have a file that you'd like to give to your customers, we recommend that you host the file on your own server and then place a link to the file within your email. This also means you won't clog your subscribers inbox with attachments they may not even use.

Here's a quick example of how one customer of ours promotes a PDF document in their emails instead of actually attaching it.

When putting together the design for a client's email newsletter, the last thing we usually think about is importing their list into Campaign Monitor. What we fail to realize, is that the quality of our client's list is going to have as much impact on the success of the campaign (and the perceived quality of our creative) as the design itself.

As we've stated before, a smaller permission based list is ALWAYS going to out perform a larger unsolicited list. If you or your client has an existing list you'd like to import, make sure you review the following scenarios to ensure your list is permission-based and OK to use with Campaign Monitor.

We're currently experiencing delivery problems to AOL recipients. We've been assured by AOL that this is only a temporary problem and will be fixed within the next 24 hours or so.

We recommend holding off on sending any campaigns to AOL recipients today. We'll update this alert as soon as you're good to go. If you've got any questions, please let us know.

UPDATE 20/7: We're still working with AOL to resolve this problem for you guys. In anticipation of this delay, we've taken a number of steps to ensure that if they take another 24 hours, we've got other options. Right now, we're sitting tight and waiting for news. If another day passes, we'll flick the switch on our alternate option and you guys can start sending to your AOL recipients. More news here shortly...

UPDATE 21/7: We're back! You can now send any campaigns to your AOL recipients without fearing any bounces. In fact, this incident has only reinforced our AOL whitelisting status.

Thanks so much for your patience. We've learnt a lot from this experience and have put a lot of new measures in place to help combat any similar situations in the future. Finally, a big thanks to Robert at AOL for his dedication to getting to the bottom of the problem at their end.