Meryl.net Home About Blog Clients Services Contact

Meryl's Notes Blog

Things wordy, geeky, and webby

SP2, Email, and KB

Thursday, September 2nd, 2004 at 5:34 PM 4 comments Category: Meryl's Notes Blog

I think by now I don’t have to say what SP2 is, but for safety’s sake, I speak of Windows XP Service Pack 2. Earlier, I provided a bunch of SP2 resources in one place. This update covers an email issue that is of concern to newsletter distributors. Also, I’ve provided a couple of more links to KB and troubleshooting resources.

Christopher Knight of E-Zine Tips brought up another biggie with SP2 that impacts HTML newsletters. A good thing and a bad thing… for Outlook Express users.

It’s good because you won’t have to look at sp.am garbage especially those who give you a free peak of pictures without knowing your age. It’s bad because it hurts legitimate email newsletters you have requested. Christopher is right. Those who target businesses won’t have to worry as much because stats show most business users are using Outlook. Those with consumers will need to look into this issue because they tend to favor Outlook Express in the multiple studies I’ve checked from 2001 to 2003.

Microsoft kb #843018 provides a workaround for Outlook Express. Outlook 2003 is whole ‘nother story and started before SP2. By default, it prevents images from appearing in a message.

Here’s a page of KB articles for XP SP2 and SP2 troubleshooting issues.

Subscribe:

RSS or

E-mail

4 comments

Posted by: Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics on September 2nd, 2004, 6:27 PM
SP2, Emails, and KB

I think by now I don’t have to say what SP2 is, but for safety’s sake, I speak of Windows XP Service Pack 2. Earlier, I provided a bunch of SP2 resources in one place. This update covers an email…
Posted by: Christopher Knight on September 3rd, 2004, 7:46 AM
From the comments I had received after that article was published, I’ve added a 3rd solution to solve this problem: Don’t publish in HTML.

It’s not the answer most folks are looking for, but it does solve the problem and most likely improves deliverability to get past many spam filters that rank HTML emails as “closer to spam.”

Always a fan of yours Meryl…:)
Posted by: codeman38 on September 3rd, 2004, 9:14 AM
For what it’s worth, it’s been affecting Mozilla and Thunderbird for much longer!

Advertisers never make a good impression on me when they send an e-mail that consists entirely of hotlinked images, with no plaintext content in sight. Sure, I could go and turn off image blocking– and in new versions of Thunderbird, it’s just a single click per message, like in OE– but you have to admit, it’s still not a good first impression at all.
Posted by: Liz Marr on September 3rd, 2004, 12:34 PM
The more I read, the more I’m thankful that my primary mail program is Pegasus. The newer verion does HTML pretty well, and photos are shown with a simple click. The filtering is far superior to anything Microsoft has. It doesn’t have the fluff and “look” of Outlook or OE - but the lack of security problems is worth every cent.