You might remember that we already have an existing Ruby gem available for the API. This gem uses the HTTP protocol to interface with our API and covers most, but not all of our API methods. Marcelo's gem instead uses the SOAP protocol and also covers every method currently available in the API. A big thanks to Marcelo for his hard work and generosity in sharing it with the Campaign Monitor community.

Just as impressively, we received an official response from Microsoft before the day was out. While this wasn't exactly the message we'd been hoping for, there were certainly some positives to be taken from it. We posted a follow up to Microsoft's response on the Email Standards project blog not long after.

Twitter is by no means a vacuum, and the amount of tweets and interest in our approach resulted in coverage across the web on a huge scale. Here are some of the highlights.

• Microsoft, Outlook Is Broken, Says 6,000 Tweets (And Growing). Fix It. - Techcrunch
• Users Pressure Microsoft to Fix Outlook - Reuters
• Microsoft defends Outlook HTML decision - CNET News
• Microsoft: Outlook's not broken and we aren't 'fixing' it - ZDNet.com
• Outlook 2010 not winning fans. . .on Twitter - CNN.com
• Sour Outlook - zeldman.com

This coverage combined with the relentless flow of tweets resulted in more than 100,000 page views on fixoutlook.org in the first day.

The story behind the site

The moment we heard the news about Outlook 2010 and tested it for ourselves, we knew it was important to act fast. If there was any possibility of getting Microsoft on board before Office 2010 then we couldn't delay any longer. After a brainstorming session, the idea to use Twitter to spread the word was born and developed quickly from there.

Ever since the site launched, we've had loads of enquiries from people interested in how the site was actually built. The site was created in less than a week by the talented guys at Newism, which we've worked with on loads of projects before. I think we can all agree that they did an amazing job.

It was a completely home grown solution the guys built out of the box using the Twitter search API. The Newism team have told me they plan on doing a more comprehensive post on the nuts and bolts of this process, so I'll be sure to share that when it eventuates.

While Twitter has been used to encourage change in lots of different ways before, there were a few unique additions that I think contributed to our success. Todd Zeigler summed it up perfectly in his post today.

What's next

We've already been back in touch with Microsoft since the site launched, and are hoping that the continued pressure from the community will lead them to re-assess their position on standards. In the mean time, we'll keep trying our best to spread the word through the ESP blog and the newly created @fixoutlook account on Twitter.

Thanks again for the amazing level of support we've had to date. 20,000 people coming together to encourage change in 24 hours is something we can all be proud of.

Since that time, we've had the pleasure of working with teams at Yahoo!, Apple, IBM, Google and even the Microsoft Entourage team. However, the elephant in the room was always Outlook. For a time things were looking good and we had the chance to chat with a number of passionate Microsoft employees who agreed with our position on standards and to try their best to improve future versions of Outlook. I'm sad to say, it looks like these efforts failed.

After testing the latest beta of Outlook 2010 and seeing the same poor standards support as 2007, a senior member of the Outlook team confirmed they plan on continuing to use Word to render HTML emails. Not only that, but early tests indicate that HTML support in the Word engine has not been improved in any way. Same bugs. Same quirks.

To demonstrate just how bad the Word rendering engine is in Outlook 2010, here's exactly the same email rendered in Outlook 2000, and then Outlook 2010. Click the image for a full sized version.

Microsoft explain their position

When Outlook 2007 was released there were lots of theories thrown around about what motivated the switch to the Word rendering engine. Many stipulated that it was a security related decision after the problems they'd been having with previous versions of Outlook. As it turns out, it was much simpler than that.

This was confirmed last week in a discussion with Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian. When asked why Outlook is using Word to compose HTML emails, this was his response:

"The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages."

"I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective - at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience."

When asked why Word is also used to render HTML emails, Dev explained:

"Having multiple HTML engines could reduce performance, as well as create an inconsistency in terms of what type of content the user is able to create vs. consume."

Basically, Microsoft are using the Word rendering engine so emails composed in Outlook will look consistent when viewed by other Outlook users (also confirmed in this Microsoft white paper).

Email is not a walled garden

Microsoft's decision to move away from the pre-2007 approach of using Internet Explorer to render emails clearly demonstrates they are not confident that emails composed using Word will render correctly in a web browser. Remember, for a second, that every other email client on the market today uses a web browser to render HTML email.

Surely Microsoft understand that if an Outlook 2010 user sends a Word formatted email to a friend using Apple Mail or Thunderbird and it's unreadable, both sender and receiver suffer a poor experience. By aiming to please Outlook-to-Outlook senders, they are punishing Outlook customers who send to those using other email clients. Given the fact that Outlook 2007 only commands around 7% email client market share, it's easy to see how short-sighted this is.

An obvious solution

To us, the solution couldn't be more clear-cut. By updating the Word engine so it can compose and render standards based HTML, all of these problems are solved. Microsoft can have its pie and eat it too.

Outlook customers can receive email from outside sources without formatting problems. They can also rest assured that any emails they send to friends and colleagues not using Outlook will display as intended.

As the market upgrades from Outlook 2007 to 2010, HTML email design can move out of the pre-standards era of the 90's bringing all the benefits that come with it.

Microsoft want your feedback on this decision

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and a year away from public release. Either we make it clear this is a bad decision now, or the disconnect between Outlook users and the rest of the email world will continue to grow. Email designers will be stuck building emails using the same clunky combination of tables for layout, inline CSS and font tags for many years to come.

Thankfully, Microsoft want to hear your feedback about this. From the Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian:

"The Office team, and Microsoft in general, is always open to and interested in customer feedback so we can prioritize the various needs of our diverse user base in product planning and development."

"This conversation alone has reignited the topic within the Outlook and Word teams and in and of itself will contribute to future design considerations... We want to hear feedback on this position, and I'm sure you and your readers will provide it."

It's time for us to send the strongest message yet to Microsoft, and we need your help to get started. To make this happen, we've built fixoutlook.org.

All you have to do is tweet your thoughts about this issue, and make sure you include the fixoutlook.org URL somewhere in the tweet. We'll be pulling together every tweet that includes this link on the fixoutlook.org site to send a unified message to Microsoft. The more tweets, the more impact, so please start spreading the word today and encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same.

To get started, head to fixoutlook.org for all the details.

You can delete both drafts and already sent campaigns, which comes in handy when you've sent a few test emails, or created a draft campaign that didn't work out. Find out exactly how it works by reading the Campaign.Delete method documentation. Thanks to our new developer James who made it all happen.

Add that to the bunch of API methods added earlier this year, and we are starting to see some very cool API integrations happening. Not everyone can write API integration code themselves, but there might be a plugin you can use to hook your Campaign Monitor account up to your other tools.

Keep an eye on the blog for more plugins and integrations over the coming months.

We've been consistently growing at more than 1,000 new customers each week for the last year now. While this is nothing short of awesome, it also means we need to be conscious of our own infrastructure. Today we completed a significant database upgrade that brings with it a host of speed improvements across the application as well as much improved scalability.

Serving your images from 15 key locations

On top of this upgrade, we also pushed a big improvement to how we render images in your recipients email clients. Traditionally, all images in HTML emails were served from our main data center in North Carolina. As of today, all campaign images are now served from a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Here's a quick map to show you the locations your campaigns are now being served from.

Whenever you import a HTML email campaign or template, we'll automatically cache copies of that content across 15 key locations around the world. Whenever a recipient opens your campaign, we'll choose the optimal data centre and serve your image content directly from there. This results in a dramatic reduction in email load times for many of your recipients. The best part is, it's completely automated, free of charge and available now.

For those customers using custom domains, your images will also be served from the CDN by default (which uses the createsend domain). All tracking links will still use your custom domain, and you can have the CDN switched off in your account at any stage by getting in touch with our support team and requesting it.

A better experience for your subscribers

This update ensures image-based campaign content will now render significantly faster for all subscribers. A reduction in load times reducing the chances of a recipient getting impatient and moving on to the next email in their inbox.

Added redundancy

As well as a big speed increase in rendering times, this update also provides additional redundancy for your campaigns. If one data center is unavailable, the content will be served from the next closest location. Think of it like 15 backups of your campaign in highly secure, reliable locations around the world, not to mention the addition backup procedures we have place in our main data center.

Lots more to come

Now that your email campaigns are rendered faster, we're moving on to more speed increases to the software itself. The first step will be serving all Campaign Monitor assets (images, CSS files, scripts, etc) from the CDN too. We're also switching to a much slimmer JavaScript library and optimizing the majority of files to keep the footprint of the software to a minimum.

While this is happening, we're also warming up a second data center location that we'll be load balancing between. This will give us another nice speed boost, add an extra level of redundancy to every layer of our platform and give us an additional range of IP's to deliver campaigns from. We'll be sharing more details about the benefits of this soon, but I wanted to keep you all in the loop about some of the exciting behind the scenes improvements coming to Campaign Monitor over the coming months.

What will this mean for me?

This maintenance period will have the following effects:

• You and your clients will not be able to login to your Campaign Monitor account. If your client does try and log in they'll see a non-branded "Down for maintenance" page letting them know when they should come back and try again.
• Campaigns scheduled to be sent during this period will not go out, but will be sent automatically as soon as the application comes back up. However, subscribes, unsubscribes and bounces will be captured during the downtime and processed into your reports afterwards. Images will continue to load in emails, and clicks and opens will also be recorded.

We will update this post once the application is back up and running and we'll also be updating our Twitter status throughout the maintenance to keep you in the loop. Thanks in advance for your patience while we complete this upgrade.

Update: The maintenance has been completed and was a success, and we have re-enabled account access. Thanks for your patience everyone.

Previously, when you wanted to remove a subscriber, the only option was to unsubscribe them from that list. Whenever someone is unsubscribed from your list, we also add them to your client-wide suppression list by default. This is a nice safety measure to ensure that subscriber is never accidentally imported into another list again and sent to.

In most cases, this is just how you want the remove subscriber feature to work. We've since discovered many of you using our subscriber lists in unique ways where you need a little more flexibility.

For example, let's say you divide your subscribers between a list of members and a list of non-members. When a non-member decides to join your organization, you need to move them across to your members list. On the flip-side, some people let their membership lapse and should be move in the opposite direction. Previously you'd need to unsubscribe them from one list, remove them from the suppression list and re-add them to the members list.

This new update makes this problem a thing of the past. Whenever you're removing one or one thousand subscribers from a list, you now have the option of just deleting them from that list, instead of unsubscribing them (highlighted in yellow below). Now you can add them straight into the other list without the suppression list messing with you.

In the example I gave above, you could also use our custom fields and segments feature to work around this problem. Just set up a custom field to indicate if they are a member or non-member and then update that custom fields by re-importing any subscribers with the new membership value.

In our experience, it can often make more sense for some customers to keep separate lists, so now you have the option of easily moving members around no matter how you approach your list management.

This one has been hard to keep under wraps, but after loads of customer requests and a few months of hard work, I'm happy to announce that we'll shortly be adding support for A/B testing to Campaign Monitor. This is one of those features that we always wanted to add, but were never completely satisfied with the best way to implement it.

Testing is one of the great strengths of email marketing. Almost everything is measurable, making it easy to compare multiple approaches and quickly figure out what works best for your subscribers. It's a guesswork killer.

That's the theory anyway. In reality, most of the A/B testing systems we've seen are bloated and hard to use beasts that require a manual just to get started. That never sat well with us, so we went back to the drawing board. We knew that if running an A/B test wasn't as quick and easy as sending a regular campaign, it was never going to get used.

We plan on releasing this in the next month or so, but wanted to give you all the heads up on what's coming. The testing feature will be available for everyone, including your clients if you've given them access to send their own campaigns.

Choose the test, we'll do the rest

Instead of forcing you to create segments of lists, send multiple campaigns and scour over pages of statistics, our testing tool does all the heavy lifting for you.

All you need to do is choose what to test (subject line, from name or different email content) and how to decide the winner (open rate, link clicks, etc) and we'll take it from there.

Campaign Monitor will then send both versions to a small subset of your recipients, see which version wins and automatically send that winning version to the remainder of your recipients. In a couple of clicks you've guaranteed that the best version of your email is being sent to your subscribers, and you've learned something doing it.

While we'll be sharing more details when A/B testing goes live in the next month or so, here's a sneak peek at how the process will look in your account.

A new type of campaign to send

When you create a new campaign, you'll notice a new tab for running an A/B split campaign. Clicking that will let you choose what test you want to run and get started.

Setting the test parameters

A simple slider makes it easy to choose the size of your list you'd like to test on. Next choose how to pick the winner and how long the test should run for.

Watching a test in progress

For all you stats junkies out there, this sweet report gives you a bird's eye view of a test as it's running. When the winner is decided, we'll send it to the rest of your list automatically. If you like, you can pre-empt this and send any time during the test.

Post-test report with benefit estimates

After the test is run and the winning version sent to the remainder of your recipients, you can access the full results of the test. We'll also extrapolate the performance improvement of the winning version to give you an idea of the total benefit of sending that version to the remainder of your list. It's a great way to justify testing to your client or boss.

When will this be available?

We're putting the finishing touches on this feature now before running it through our usual phase of heavy testing (thanks to our new QA engineer Trish). While we can't give an exact date just yet, we're hoping to have this available in all accounts within a months time. We plan on sharing more as we get closer to launch.

If you have any feedback (positive or negative) or questions about this new feature, we'd love to hear them below.

While we've dabbled in some banner advertising before, I decided to take a more thoughtful approach this time. We put together a number of banners, dedicated landing pages and put conversion tracking in place to measure the results. When looking into this process initially, I didn't come across many write-ups from advertisers on what worked, what didn't and just how effective the ads had been for them. In the interest of helping fill that void, here's the process we went through, and some of the surprising results that eventuated.

Coming up with the ad creative

As part of the merger between Campaign Monitor and MailBuild last year (more on that here), we added a stack of new features to make it easy for designers to earn passive income off their clients through email marketing. In a nutshell, you can create a sub-account for each client, set the price they should pay and earn a profit every time they send.

We figured this was something that lots of designers might find useful and it became the focus of our banner ads and associated landing pages. Here are the 3 ads we ran with initially.

For the final design of these ads we enlisted the help of the clever team at Newism, the same team that coded the current version of the Campaign Monitor site. We couldn't have been happier with the results.

The Landing Pages

As well as testing multiple ad creative, we decided to put together a number of dedicated landing pages for the campaign. We'd randomly display a different landing page for each visitor and measure which one converted best. We bought in the amazing Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain (who designed our web site) and Brad Hayes to help with the design.

Landing Page 1: Earn money in your sleep

This key for this page was to promote the idea of earning money in your sleep. We highlighted the 3 simple steps involved (rebrand, resell and then profit) and included an inline signup form allowing those interested to signup and start using the app on the spot.

Landing Page 2: Are you a designer?

This was definitely the most controversial landing page of the four. We took the fact that Campaign Monitor is built for designers to the extreme by including a modal window that overlays the landing page asking the person if they are a designer or not. If they clicked "You betcha", they'd be shown the page below that highlights how easy it is to resell Campaign Monitor.

If they clicked "Nope", the landing page behind the modal would fade out with a message explaining that "It's not you. It's us." We then linked to a number of other Email Service Providers that they might consider checking out that are built for a less targeted audience.

Unexpectedly, this approach stirred up a lot of conversation on Twitter. Some called us ballsy and classy for linking to our competition, others asked if we were breaking up with them. I personally received a number of emails from people complimenting us on being open and honest with people. The truth is, we've always referred potential customers to our competitors when we know they're not the right match (see this post from 2 years ago). It's how we'd want to be treated, so it's only fair that we do the same to our customers.

Landing page 3: Modal-free just for designers

In the interest of testing what sort of impact the modal window might have on conversions, we also tested it against the very same landing page modal-free. The page was exactly the same otherwise, so should provide a nice comparison.

Landing page 4: Our home page

In the past we've just pointed people to our home page, which in itself is a landing page aimed at converting people to give us a try. Will it out-perform the dedicated landing pages that have a clearer connection to the ad creative?

The Results

Over April and May we booked advertising spots with The Deck and Fusion Ads along with Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, Webdesigner Depot, Webresources Depot and CSS Elite.

We set up a redirect script on our servers that would choose one of the 4 landing pages above for each visitor and pass through any of the required parameters in the URL so we could track everything with Google Analytics. We have a number of goals set up so we can track important things like a customer signing up, sending a test campaign and becoming a paying customer. If you're interested, our designer Dave Martin has written about our Google Analytics setup in more detail here.

We judged the performance of each banner ad and landing page on the number of visitors that signed up to Campaign Monitor, as opposed to basing it purely on revenue. Because of the nature of our pricing, it can be weeks or even months before a customers starts paying for our software. We'll use the revenue numbers internally over the coming months to get a true idea of ROI.

The best performing banner ad

The blueprint banner ad outperformed the other two with a conversion rate of 3.5% resulting in 370 people signing up for Campaign Monitor. Here are the full results.

The best performing landing page

This one surprised everyone. Personally, I was concerned the modal window would result in a lower conversion rate because of the barrier of an additional click. I was pleasantly surprised to see this page gave us 25% more conversions than the next best performing page. Possibly the biggest surprise of all was that the "Earn money in your sleep" page with the inline signup form didn't give us one new customer. Not one! Here are the full results.

The best explanation we could provide for this is that people like to check out a product more before signing up (there was no link to the product from the page, the focus was on the signup form). The other landing pages provided links back to the site where an interested customer could take a feature tour, check out the pricing, etc before signing up. On top of this, the form had a total of eight required fields. Reducing this to the bare minimum and asking for the customer data after they signed up might have helped convert more. But still, not one?

The best performing advertiser

From the day we turned these ads on, Fusion Ads has consistently been our best converter. This includes visitors who have signed up right through to total revenue to date. We've also seen good conversion rates from other advertisers, which you can see in the results below.

It's important to keep in mind that these are conversion rates only, and don't give any indication of the true return on investment. For example, while The Deck has been our second best converter, it's also more expensive than any of the other ad slots. Because of the rates we've managed to negotiate with some providers, I'm afraid I can't share the costs associated with each ad spot, but most are easily found on each respective advertiser's site.

Was it worth it?

Right now it's too early to tell just how long it will take for this campaign to pay for itself and then turn a profit (don't forget the cost of designing the banners and landing pages as well as the ongoing advertising fees). To date we've only recovered around 25% of all expenses in revenue from new customers. Having said that, a large percentage of our customers continue to use our software for an extended period of time. Looking at how revenue has been growing from these customers in the last few weeks, it certainly seems that in the longer-term this exercise will be well worth it. The nature of our business model means that it will be a few more months before we'll really know.

To me, the most important element was actually testing everything as we went. By putting in a little extra work, we could quickly gauge which ad creative, landing page and advertiser was giving us the best results and react accordingly.

Our next steps will be to continue to refine the winning landing page using Google Website Optimizer to improve conversions further. On top of this we'll be trying some new ad creative and throwing a few new advertisers into the mix. I'll try and put together a follow up in a few months time with anything else we might have learned in the mean time.

We've just put the finishing touches on a simple code sample you can use to achieve just that. The best part is, we've built it so you can just drop in the supplied subscribe code and you're done. The code will also check to make sure the email address entered is valid before it processes the form. Once a submission has been made, the form will be hidden and a confirmation message shown in its place.

This example was put together using jQuery and PHP. The concept is fairly simple and the code is well commented, so it could easily be adapted to another programming language.

You can download the code here. You'll find a zip file with two documents, a small PHP file that acts as a proxy, and the HTML page containing the form and JavaScript. Feel free to modify them both to suit your needs.

On a side note, this sample code was put together by David Martin, Campaign Monitor's new designer extraordinaire. You'll be seeing much more of Dave's work over the coming months when we release some exciting new features he's been hard at work on.

One of the best ways to sell them on the idea of Campaign Monitor is by letting them actually use it for themselves, and see how easy it is. Of course, you don't want to end up paying for their 'test campaign' which goes out to their entire 20,000 person list! Fortunately, there is a simple way to set up a demo account that won't let them spend your money.

First, create a demo client (you might want to set it up with their company name to make it feel customized to them). Add a subscriber list of 5 or less people, so emails sent to that list will be free. Now you have a couple of options for how to limit this demo account.

Under 'client settings', you'll want to hit 'Edit Access and Billing'. Check the 'Create and send their own campaigns' box. At this point, you could simply set the client to pay for their own campaigns. So if they do decide to go ahead and send to a larger list, they'll have to add their own card details and pay themselves.

Sometimes, this will be fine. In other cases, you may not want to allow that at all. So your other choice is to pay on their behalf. To make this work, you'll need some email credits in your account. Once you have them, click 'Allocate email credits' under client settings. Now you can allocate a small number of credits to your demo client.

The key is to given them either an amount you are happy to let them spend (like the 1,000 credits above), or an amount that will only let them send free campaigns (i.e less than 500 credits). Then make sure you have selected 'Don't allow them to send until I allocate more credits to them' under 'When their credits run out'.

Now your demo client has a hard limit on how many emails can be sent. Your potential client can login, manage subscribers, send test campaigns and view reports, but not spend any money. If they try to send a larger campaign, they'll see this message:

You can give out the details to your demo account without having to worry. We'd love to hear about how you demo Campaign Monitor to your clients, so if you have a trick you are willing to share, post a comment.

What we were looking for was something fun, something related to Campaign Monitor or email marketing, but also something that wasn't just a promotional shirt. There is enough of those around already.

We wanted something people would actually enjoy wearing, not just a billboard for your chest. It should also be something that lends itself to a t-shirt design, and isn't too insulting.

We've also added in some of the popular suggestions that didn't quite win last time, to give them another chance at glory.

We'll leave the voting open for a week or so, and announce the winning shirts some time after that.

Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions. Now go add your vote!

We just wanted to give some more details, most importantly to let you know that the block was removed.

We are no longer blacklisted

We finally heard back from Spamhaus late last night, letting us know they had removed the listing. At that point, many of the blocking problems were instantly resolved, including Yahoo mail. However, a lot of smaller ISPs and email providers maintain their own lists, and use Spamhaus as one of their sources.

So our support team then ensured that we contacted and were delisted by all of those companies too. A special thanks to Diana, support team legend, who did a lot of that work.

The end result is that the vast majority of blocks have been resolved now. We are still waiting for some of those smaller delistings to trickle through and take effect, and expect that to happen sometime today. If your campaign is not urgent, it would be best to wait a little longer to give those providers more chance to update their lists.

Please contact us for refunds of the blocked emails

If your campaign (or your client's campaign) was impacted, please contact support and let us know. We will add credits to your account to cover the actual blocks, and also the sending fee, so you can resend the campaign to the affected subscribers at no cost.

How can I resend to the people who were blocked?

Unfortunately, we don't have a direct way to do this for you. You have a couple of options, depending on the size of the campaign and which domains were blocked for you.

Create a segment of the blocked domains

If you look at your campaign report, and you can see that you had soft bounce blocks from up to (say) 10 different domains, you can send just to those people. To do that, first make a list of the domains you want to send to.

Then, jump into the 'segments' section of your list. See our help topic on segments for an overview of the process. For this method, you'll want to create a segment based on email addresses.

Setup a series of OR rules like

Email address CONTAINS yahoo

OR

Email address CONTAINS hotmail

Adding in each of the domains you want to resend to. This method will be the most accurate way to send to the people you know did not receive it. If you have too many domains to deal with, you'll need to use the second method:

Create a segment of all unopened emails

This method is much faster, if you have people from a lot of different domains being blocked. Again, you would create a segment, but this time using a rule like:

Campaign (your campaign name) WAS NOT opened

If you use this method, it is quite likely you will resend to some people who did actually get your email (see how open tracking works), so you may want to add a notice to the top of your email apologising and explaining the situation.

Exporting the bounces and creating a new list

This technique is quite simple and effective as a one off resend. You can view your affected campaign, and click through to the soft bounces. If you see that most or all look like blocks, you can export the list of bounces from that page. Then create a new subscriber list, and import the file you just created. That gives you a list you can send the campaign to, and then delete afterwards.

The choice of which technique to use really depends on the size of your campaign, how heavily it was impacted and how urgent the material is. Keep in mind that you may not need to resend at all. It is unlikely that every person who was blocked would have actually opened the email, so you may decide just to send your next campaign to everyone as per normal.

These blocks were only soft bounces, so the subscribers will still be active in your list. We'd like to apologise again for the trouble this has caused, and please know that we are already working on ways to avoid being in this position again.

We'd also like to thank everyone who was supportive and understanding during this period, all of us at Campaign Monitor really appreciate it.

Earlier today a blacklist, Spamhaus, added Campaign Monitor's IP addresses to its list because of one or more complaints about a particular campaign sent by one of our customers. That list is used by some email providers as a way to prevent spam.

In this specific case, many emails to Yahoo and Hotmail, as well as other email providers which use Spamhaus, are being blocked. If this has happened to your campaign, you will see mailblock bounces in your reports. Test emails to these addresses are also affected. It is not possible to know which systems are using this blacklist as part of their filtering unfortunately.

It is a part of every email service providers role to monitor for these listings, which inevitably occur, and take immediate action to remove them.

What is being done about it?

We've already contacted Spamhaus, explaining our strict anti-spam policies and procedures, and offered information about the specific email in question.

We have also had our upstream hosting provider (top level owner of the IP addresses) following up on our behalf.

How does this affect my clients?

We will be putting a notice up in your client's accounts, so when they go to create a campaign they will be warned of this problem. It will not give away anything about Campaign Monitor though, so it won't impact your rebranding.

When will this be fixed?

Unfortunately, at this point we can only wait for that block to be removed. At this stage, we do not have a time frame as to when that will be done.

Will those emails be resent once the block is lifted?

We won't automatically resend them, as we understand that some emails need to go out at a certain time, or not at all. However, if you contact us we will be happy to credit your account for the failed emails.

Will you let me know when it is fixed?

We will update this blog post once we have confirmation that the issue has been resolved. We'll also update our twitter account with any changes.

Can I send my next campaign anyway?

If your list contains few Yahoo or Hotmail addresses, and is mostly to specific business domains, this listing might not be an issue for you.

Another alternative, if you need to reach your subscribers right away would be to create a segment that has all the people who are not using Yahoo or Hotmail addresses.

One rule you would need is 'email address DOES NOT CONTAIN "yahoo", for example. That would give you a list of everyone else that you could email without paying for emails that can't get through.

How will you stop this happening again?

We have many different tools we use to prevent and resolve these types of problems, including software monitoring, bounce log reading tools and other external systems.

We can never guarantee it won't happen, but we do work very hard to maintain our excellent sending reputation. Unfortunately, the nature of blacklists is that anyone can complain about an email, rightly or not, and the onus is on us to follow up.

We're very sorry to cause you and your clients any delay or hassle, and we're doing everything we can to get it sorted out for you.

Here's a reminder of what the winners look like:

On the left we have The Counter: "This shirt has been viewed 4782 times". That slogan was from Jason Dancisin. In the center is Security: "To protect your security, the image on this shirt was suppressed automatically". Thanks to Mark Brownlow for his winning slogan work.

And finally on the right I'm Single: "I'm single, forward me to a friend". I have to take responsibility for that one. We have both men's and women's cuts for the shirts, which we are told is a rarity in the nerd-software-shirt world.

After two years of these sweet designs, the time has come for some new shirts. We may well keep the old ones in rotation, but we're also looking for some new ideas, and that is where you come in. Today we are launching our new t-shirt competition, your chance to have your slogan or idea designed and printed and available in actual meat space clothing form.

So how does this work?

It's super simple. Just leave a comment below with your suggested slogan, phrase or other idea. We'll collect them for a week or two, and then put them to a public vote. We do of course reserve the right ultimately to decide on which ones get printed. Having seen some of the previous suggestions, this is essential!

Here's the chart showing the most popular suggestions from last time:

Keep in mind, this is something that will be representing Campaign Monitor, so as funny as your 'stimulus package' gags might be, they probably won't make it onto a shirt. Don't let that stop you making the comment though! Try thinking about some of the phrases used in Campaign Monitor and email marketing to kick off some ideas.

What is in it for me?

We're going to have some awesome prizes for the top 3 selected shirts. That will include receiving one of each of the winning designs, plenty of Campaign Monitor credits and for the ultimate winner, a very cool prize which we'll announce later.

What are the rules?

The first rule of the t-shirt competition is that you can talk about the t-shirt competition. The second rule is that you can submit as many ideas as you like. Otherwise, it is pretty well open. Obviously we are looking for email marketing related ideas, things which could be conceivably used on a Campaign Monitor shirt.

How can I get a shirt, once they are done?

This time around, we won't be selling the shirts at all. We'll be giving away shirts to designers who feature in our gallery, people who are helpful in our forums, and to people we meet at the various web design events we sponsor or attend.

So get cracking on some awesome campaigns for your clients, and you could well end up with a new shirt as well as some mark-up profits.

What is your idea for a Campaign Monitor shirt?

This month we've hit a very big milestone, one we're really excited about.

We've now paid out to our customers over $1,000,000 US in mark-up!

Those profits have been paid in US, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Dollars, as well as in British Pounds and Euros, but converted back to US Dollars, the grand total just broke the million.

That's a fantastic result for all the designers involved, and for us too. It means that instead of designers having to pay to use Campaign Monitor, we're paying them! Their clients are getting a tool that they can send emails quickly, in an attractive format and with no HTML skills required. Email marketing can be an excellent additional service for your web company, read on to find out more.

What! How can I get some of that?

In case you haven't looked into this for yourself, here's the basic idea. Campaign Monitor is at its core a product built for web designers. The designer creates an account, and then in that account sets up all their clients. For each client, they provide one or more custom templates that the client can login, select, add content to and send.

The designer can choose to have their client pay for the campaigns themselves, and select the amount that each campaign costs, by marking up our base rates. So instead of $5 to send, and 1 cent per email, they may have their client pay $10 to send, and 2 cents per email. Now each time that client logs in and sends a campaign, everything that is above the base rate is set aside, and paid back to the designer at the end of the month via Paypal.

Some designers choose a very minimal mark-up, but charge for the template design. Others have quite a big mark-up, but provide free templates and ongoing consulting. The main point is that once the templates are in place, those profits just arrive without the designer having to do anything. It can be a lucrative ongoing revenue stream while you are busy doing other work.

If you are interested, make sure you checkout our case studies, where we chat with designers who have built their own rebranded email marketing systems based on Campaign Monitor. The newest example is SelectMailer, who have done a really slick job with their website.

There are no extra charges or fees to rebrand Campaign Monitor as your own product, you just set up an account, design yourself a marketing site and get into it. See our resources section for more information about offering email marketing to your clients.

All indications are that email marketing will continue to thrive, as businesses look for low cost, high impact areas to spend their money. If you can offer a tool to help them do that effectively, measurably and quickly, you'll be well positioned to benefit.

Next month, will Campaign Monitor be sending you some money?

If you are involved in the web or software industries, you have probably noticed during the last week their Stimulus package, in which they offered $5 small team licenses for JIRA and Confluence. All the proceeds from this sale were to go to the children's educational charity, Room to Read.

This kind of campaign can only work if it attracts a lot of interest, and the team at Atlassian decided to give it a kick start by emailing their existing customers and newsletter subscribers with the details of the offer. Below is an example of an email to a customer:

There were variations for customers who had one or the other products already, with a slightly different message so that the content was quite targeted. You will notice that the readers were explicitly asked to twitter the offer out to others, and pass it on. In total, Atlassian were able to reach around 70,000 people directly through permission based email.

It is easy to see how successful those emails were in getting the word out! As Atlassian team member Morgan Friberg told us:

In the end, we surpassed our goal 4Xs over! Looking back at the success of this campaign, we credit a lot of it to the emails we sent with your product... Amazing.

Atlassian raised more than $100,000 for their chosen charity, which really is fantastic, while reaching out to a ton of people who now have the chance to use Atlassian products for the first time. There is a lesson here that you may be able to apply to your own campaigns, or your client's campaigns:

Don't forget about the role of email in the web 2.0 world. Even though a lot of the actual spreading of the offer happened on Twitter, and on various blogs, the initial push started with email.

Asking someone directly for their help, right there in their inbox, is different to just posting it online and letting people find it themselves. Email can be powerful, and when used for the right reasons it can be a fantastic tool for your business (or charity).

Does this example give you some ideas about your own subscriber lists? Let us know in the comments.

Over the coming weeks we plan on highlighting more and more customers who are generally kicking ass with Campaign Monitor. Some are using it to save time, some to impress their clients and many to earn additional revenue without lifting a finger. Today I wanted to highlight a customer fast becoming the poster child for reselling Campaign Monitor.

UK based Webselect have been doing an amazing job reselling Campaign Monitor as their own product called Selectmailer. They now have an incredible 80+ clients regularly sending emails through their account which has helped them "dramatically increase sales". I recently chatted with Webselect Managing Director Mark Walker to learn more about the Selectmailer story and any secrets behind his impressive success to date. Check out the full case study to hear Mark's story.

If you're doing cool stuff with Campaign Monitor and would like to be profiled, get in touch, we'd love to hear from you and share your story.

While the upload is a simple process, there are a number of fancy things happening behind the scenes. Things like automatically grabbing any externally referenced CSS files, moving that CSS inline, uploading your images to our own servers and changing any image references.

We recently made a few further improvements to the import process that I'd like to share with you today.

Checking all your images exist

Previously, if an image referenced in your HTML wasn't included in the zip, you'd end up with a broken image in your email. Now we double check all image references and ensure you never have any broken images in your email content.

If you do have an image missing, we let you know the exact file that's not there and let you re-import your campaign with the image present. Here's a screenshot of the alert you'll see when images are missing.

Forget about folder structure

Previously, the folder structure in your zip file had to be an exact match with the way those images were references in your HTML file. So, if your images were all referenced in a folder called /img/, you'd need to make sure you zipped that actual folder, instead of just zipping the images within that folder.

This was a bit of gotcha for some of you, so we've re-written our approach to search the entire zip for corresponding images. If it's referenced in the HTML file and it exists somewhere in the zip, we'll match it up for you.

Reducing your HTML footprint

When some of you build your emails, you like to go crazy with complex folder structures. The images in your email might be sitting in the folder /campaign-images/september2008/psd/concepts/final/newsletter/header.gif (this is nothing, we've seen image references and folder names hundreds of characters long). When you have lots of images in your HTML email, the image references along can add significant file size to the email itself. It can also result in very long lines of text, which some email clients can choke on.

We now automatically move all your images into an "images" folder, so instead of the image reference above, you'd just have images/header.gif. If you have duplicate file names across multiple folders, we'll automatically rename them for you and adjust the reference in your HTML accordingly.

Removing spaces automatically

Most browsers are forgiving enough with spaces in image file names. Unfortunately some email clients are not. We now remove all spaces in you image file names automatically, and update your HTML to ensure you get the best results possible in all email clients.

Growth continues for Apple

As each month passes it's becoming clear that Apple's email client market share is growing aggressively. Their mobile platform that includes both the iPhone and iPod Touch has held the top spot as the fastest growing email client since we started capturing data.

Apple users are the fastest to upgrade too. The iPhone 1.0 operating system has been one of the fastest shrinking email clients to date. The iPhone was originally released with v1.0 in June 2007 and an upgrade to v2.0 was available after the iPhone 3G release in July 2008. Today v1.0 only has 0.06% of the email client market, while iPhone 2.0 (released in July 2008) is just under 700 times more popular with 4% of the market. This dramatic difference can be attributed to the global success of the iPhone 3G and the simple software update mechanism Apple has in place with iTunes.

As I've mentioned previously, the fact that the iPhone email client doesn't block images by default can inflate the market share in comparison to those that do block images (read more about this). But, this drawback has no influence on its change in usage over time. OS 2.0 has growth by more than 90% since September 2008 and the latest figures indicate that growth isn't slowing.

It will be very interesting to see how quickly users upgrade to OS 3.0 when it's released this coming June. We'll have a birds-eye view of the transition and will report anything interesting we find.

Gmail usage lower than expected

One piece of feedback we're continually seeing is the surprise that Gmail has only 5% or so of the email client market while Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have more than 3 times that share each. In fact, Gmail's market share has dropped by nearly 15% since September last year.

It's important to remember that all three web-based email providers support image blocking by default, so the numbers aren't skewed in any particular providers favor. Given the size of our sample audience (now more than 300 million opens and counting), it's also safe to say that this isn't through lack of data.

I know what you're thinking. That can't be right! That's certainly what we thought when we saw the data. Here are a few reasons why we think this is the case.

Renders do not always equal market share

We count a vote for Gmail when a recipient opens an email from within the Gmail interface. The problem is, many Gmail users actually open their email through other devices using Gmail's POP3 or IMAP support.

For example, we use Google Apps for our email hosting. Some of us use the Gmail interface but most use desktop or mobile email clients and for those people a vote will be registered for that email client, not Gmail. While Yahoo! Mail (and more recently Hotmail) support POP3, it's more than likely that Gmail usage is proportionately higher than these providers when it comes to accessing mail through other devices.

Don't forget, the purpose of our email client report is to show the clients your subscribers are actually viewing your email in. If a subscriber is using Gmail but actually opening the email in Outlook 2007, that's what email designers need to know. Because of this, the report is more about rendering market share than a providers total share of the market.

Think outside your own circle

It's important to step out of the early adopter circles that many of you (myself included) work in. In our latest newsletter to 80,000 or so designers, Gmail accounted for 9% of our subscribers, while Yahoo! Mail was only 3% and Hotmail 2%. The usage patterns of designers is clearly very different to the rest of the market.

Just because you prefer Gmail, doesn't mean your aunty does.

On that note, a little reminder that every list is different. The only way to truly know which email clients your subscribers are using (and design accordingly) is through our free email client reports included with every campaign you send.