I have a problem. We've designed some beautiful, responsive email templates that work across mobile/tablet using media queries but contain MSO conditionals to work on Outlook. Turns out, the client now claims they can only send through an exchange-based mailing list. Ouch.
Problem:
If I send from Mac OSX's Mail, it retains the media queries and works (they are then stripped in Outlook when opened by receiver, but that's inevitable)
If I send from Outlook, it strips media queries completely and sends without them
From my thinking, the only solutions are:
Distribute through a different email client that supports both viewport media queries such as Mac Mail and allows connection to Exchange (know any? Thunderbird?)
Somehow obtain the mailing list and distribute through MailChimp or similar
Appreciate any advice anyone may have.
Depends on how good you care in code and whether you'll need clients to access your system. You can go with user friendly, feature packed options like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor.
Much cheaper but less featured (relies heavily on you integrating through their api) is Sendgrid
If you want to stick to free, PHPList might be a good option.
Related
My users register on my website (200 per day) and can select from a large pool of categories (100) of content they are interested in: Tech, Business, Health... and so on.
I want to send them an email every week with a digest of the categories they selected.
What's the best tool for the job?
I'm not sure you can do that with Mailchimp and is really expensive considering my user count growth. Plus, users would register on my database and then would have to re register and confirm it on Mailchimp.
I was thinking of making my own / buying something custom that uses Amazon SES.. Looks cheaper. Is that a good idea? What would the obstacles be? Is it very hard to manage bounces, getting your domain through spam blockers and stuff?
Mailchimp is a great way to go here. You can use their API so that your users do not need to re-register. Their content creation tools are great as well so you can build everything you need with them. https://apidocs.mailchimp.com/gettingstarted/connectivity.php
Building out your own tools really depends on what all your platform does today.. that make vs buy decision is a complex one.
I am designing an html email newsletter. As you may know, this is a headache. We're currently going round and round with a few different email-client specific quirks like a game of whack-a-mole. You get something working in one client and it breaks another.
I know that on desktop browsers, is it possible – tho not advisable, particularly scalable, nor completely reliable – to do device detection server-side. What I am wondering is, is there any way to do server-side email client detection for html email newsletters?
I'm trying to figure out a solution to manage our transaction emails (such as the welcome email, you've got a bid, etc...)
We would like to be able to allow marketing to manage the content of the emails, and create split tests to test content / subject lines / etc...
Ideally we could invent our own success metrics to report back to the email management system (such as user completed registration, accepted bid, etc...).
Right now we have our emails in templates using stringtemplate. The code replaces tokens with the correct content for that email.
Strongmail is a potential solution, but it is pricey - anybody have experience with alternatives?
I'm looking for the same kind of service, and https://www.sendwithus.com/ seems to do the job.
Have you taken a look at PostageApp?
Currently, it's a layer between your web app and your SMTP server which has additional features for your transactional emails.
With PostageApp, you are able to create two different templates and have them triggered alternately with different content and subject lines. However, the metrics that you would want to use for A/B testing aren't built into the system yet, so I'm not sure if it would be a good fit for you.
Full Disclosure: I work for The Working Group, the company that created PostageApp.
But if you do have questions about what we can help you with and what we can't, definitely let me know and I can answer plenty of questions for you!
Try http://www.cakemail.com/
It is a third party, you design your workflows and give them your contacts.
I work for a 6 million a year website company and we direct all our clients to them, so far so good, everyone is happy.
You have to contact them to have a price but you can get a free account for testing
Do all modern email clients (online and desktop apps) support MHTML email content in which images and other resources are embedded in the email?
In addition is this the standard that should be used to get a consistent HTML email message out or is it better to send HTML emails with linked resources.
Note: I am aware of the 7 reasons why HTML e-mail is EVIL but it is essential in this case. Also I have seen the article on css support in HTML emails and know these pitfalls.
Pretty well all of them. MIME multipart is pretty durn common at this point.
Yes, just keep in mind that many clients do not load the images by default to avoid giving away "alive" account details to spammers.
Don't expect JavaScript to work (some users have it and it works), but Outlook/Outlook Express have had a bad history with JavaScript and IIRC have completely blocked it by default in recent versions.
I would like to write a plug-in that will allow a custom written CRM to read and write to their local Outlook client. I know that this poses a security concern. But, my clients are asking that their CRM "be connected" to Outlook. They would like to be able to do the following:
A) When a contact sends them an email (reply or free standing email), they'd like the details of this email to go INTO the CRM. Yep. They would like me to save the body, time and date it was sent, etc.
B) They want to be able to send new emails (or replies to existing emails) from within the CRM itself. Basically, "a form that looks like Outlook's send/reply email form".
C) Want the ability to search for contacts and the related emails with a search for tags/keywords facility. (i.e. if a product name or code appears in an email then they want the email returned in the search).
D) Having performed a search of many contacts, they will want to prepare a mailer and shoot out some sort of email announcement to their qualified leads. This could be 50, 100, or more persons. So its got to be able to allow bulk mailing.
E) Given a list of new prospects, that arent currently contacts in the CRM, they will want to do the same and if they get replies from this mailer to the prospects, the will want the replies to be saved in the DB and contacts be inserted into the DB.
F) They would like to be able to utilize the calendar and task list facilities of Outlook from the CRM, as well.
More or less, they want this pretty basic (as it is today) CRM that I created to integrate with Outlook and have it do so seamlessly as if it was an add-on to the CRM. A plug-in is what I am thinking...
But, I dont know where to begin. My environment is Windows XP/Vista and is going to be ASP.NET and I am going to use the VB.NET language to accomplish this. What do I need? Are there resources out there that can describe how to build a plug-in to Outlook as I have been asked to? This is not Exchange, none of the clients use exchange (not so far). They all run Outlook. Mostly 2003. Most clients are XP right now but some are upgrading to Vista.
For some reason I cant seem to wrap my head around this. I think the whole security issue is thwarting my ability to see past what is probably a simple thing. The client doesnt want to be prompted by any security messages asking them if they are sure they want to send 382 emails to their contacts. Not once and certainly not 382 times.
Where do I begin? I've searched the internet for similar but mainly what I found are already-written products and I've got to write this from scratch.
I was part of the team that created the original Outlook Plug-In for Frankley Covey time management tools. It was quite an adventure!
The first thing I would do is make your client pick a version of Outlook, and stick with it. DO NOT let the client add support for additional Outlook versions, unless they are willing to pay for it, and willing to have the delivery time pushed back to a reasonable date.
The team I was with swore by the Slipstick website. There are several solutions to the Outlook security prompts in there.
If you can, talk to Microsoft and see if they can get you the object model for the specific version of Outlook you will be working with. We had this model printed on a large scale color printer and put it on a large wall. IIRC, it was something like 7'x5' object map. This helped tons.
You might end up creating specific classifications/namespaces for your Outlook code. It's been a while, but I remember something about a dot notation like .Email, .Task, and several others. I had to create a couple new dot namespaces for the Outlook Task object.
As razorfish noted, look up the new Visual Studio For Office Tools. This has made some stuff a lot easier.
Talk to your client and find out if they will need to connect to Exchange servers. There were two distinct ways of building Plug-ins. One mode only worked with Outlook itself, while the other talked with Exchange. This is very important to your development efforts. The models are VERY different and will cost you extra time if you pick the wrong one.
EDIT: There are a couple books that were helpful with this. The books are for Outlook 2000, so you might want to see if there are updated versions.
Building Applications with Microsoft Outlook 2000 Technical Reference
Building Applications using Outlook 2000, CDO, Exchange, and Visual Basic
Both have a lot of information on how to do deep integrations with Outlook.
You should take a look at the Visual Studio for Office Tools. You can easily create add-ins for Outlook, Word, Excel ... pretty much the entire Microsoft Office family of products.
You can also take a look at Add-In Express, but I didn't have much luck with their controls, and the VSTO for 2008 is extremely easy to use.
Check out Kayxo Insight. It's a framework for creating the kind of solution you are describing.
Check out www.softomate.com they offer plugins and integration solutions for various projects.