I love Gmail. I don’t know what it is about Gmail that compels me to keep Gmail active at all times in my browser. Though I’ve used other services, none had me checking emails on a regular basis like Gmail. As a Thunderbird user, moving emails into Gmail was a breeze.

The following steps using Thunderbird as the example should work similarly for other email clients — the biggest difference would be in setting up the IMAP part. I know Outlook can do it.

Step 1. Turn on IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol — techie stuff, we won’t dive into that) in Gmail. Google explains how to get started with IMAP in Gmail. To turn on IMAP from within Gmail:

1. Click Settings.
2. Select Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
3. Select Enable IMAP button.

Step 2. Set up IMAP in your email client. In Thunderbird, I created a new IMAP account in for Gmail (don’t use the Gmail option in Thunderbird’s Account Wizard).

Step 3. Select emails and move them into the Gmail folder just like you move any files into another folder. If a folder contains hundreds of emails, do a few at a time as it takes time for the email client to process and move them. Beware that this process MOVES the files not COPIES them, so they won’t be in Thunderbird once you move them.

Remember to comment on this week’s post if you want a chance to win prizes. Seth Godin’s DVD set worth $800 is up for grabs!

• Should you sign your blog comments? Or is it redundant?
• “A Small Sheik Escaped” and other Editing Exercises to Energize Your Writing
• 7 Essential Ways to Build Trust in Your Business: I think great service goes a long way. Usually those who care about their customers also do good work.
• Blogger Relations: I don’t need a new best friend.
• Writing the Farewell Symphony: Though I took a break from blogging, I still had to manage the prizes and intros. But what would happen if this place went silent for two weeks?
• The Future of the Future: Good-bye knowledge worker… Hello, knowledge entrepreneur [Link: My sister]
• A Guide to CSS Support in Email: Still difficult to make all email clients happy.
• Newsmap: Visually captures the Google News news aggregator in a treemap.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• Ordinary Online Store… Or is it…? (other than not being in English)
• Mind Bluff: Optical illusions, mind games, puzzles, brain teasers, etc.
• 10 Funniest Apple-Ad Parodies
• Office OFFline Web Comic: Funny!

• Add Spark to Your Writing with These 3 Simple Tweaks: I shy away from sentences where I use repeating words even though a comma separates them. This convinced me otherwise.
• So You Want to Become a Freelance Writer? Four part article with advice from the pros.
• Best Pro-Blogging Sentence in 2008: Wonderful quote from a CEO on why blogging matters in business.
• Disposable Email Addresses: Want something? Not sure if you can trust a source asking for your email?
• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks: Love this. I’ve got friends who do this in email plus add unnecessary apostrophes. Nice to laugh instead of cringe for a change.
• Idea Seeds for Successful Articles and Posts: Creative approach to finding ideas.
• Searching for Mr. (Pardon, Mrs. and Ms., too) Good Host: A guest post of mine over at my guest blogger‘s site

And for fun… because we’re allowed…

• Speak LOL Cat [Link: Peter Shankman]
• Bored at work, but don’t want to get caught reading fiction or poetry? How about reading this stuff in PowerPoint? This takes work to figure out — but you log in as a user and click the folders. Start Here.

Taking cue from The One Minute Manager, Zapp!, Fish! and Who Moved My Cheese?, The Hamster Revolution uses a parable to show how to better manage and organize e-mail and information. The hamster represents people endlessly running on the wheel of e-mail. Right away, I start using concepts from the 90-minute book. Considering I’m an organized person, that says something.

In the story, Harold the Hamster receives a visit from an information coach to help him with e-mail and information management. Harold is a person who turned into a hamster because e-mail and information trapped him on a figurative hamster wheel.

Harold and his coach think aloud as they explore his e-mail habits and inbox to find the problem areas. The banter between the two gives the reader insight into why something doesn’t work and how to fix it. Their comments mirror what many of us think when we’re drowning in messages. Though cheesy at times, the story quickly explains the how, what, and why without confusing readers with dry writing.

I was eager to discover the secret of COTA, the concept for creating folders named Clients, Output, Teams and Administration. COTA also represents the order of priority. The Clients folder receives top honors on the hierarchy than Output. Administration gets thrown to the bottom of the pile where it belongs. But this concept isn’t as foolproof as the authors make it sound.

They state that you won’t run into a situation when an email or document belongs in two folders. However, if that should happen — then the document belongs in the one higher up on the COTA ladder. Furthermore, the system serves departments and teams best.

COTA won’t work well for personal use (the authors apparently have another system for this, but information isn’t available yet) or a small business like mine where I’m a freelancer working on a computer that houses both business and personal information.

Furthermore, not everyone will know what some things mean such as EOM (end of message) or NRN (no reply needed). These require teaching others and a team setting would adapt to that better than a lone person who must explain it in many individuals. EOM and NRN should become as standard as smilies, but they’re far from there.

Some advice might sound common sense or old news to some people, but the authors share lesser known or new concepts. The book has had positive impact on my e-mail habits, and for what it is worth, that opinion comes from a long-time e-mail user (the days of BBSes — pre-Internet).

• Title: The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You
• Author: Mike Song, Vicki Halsey & Tim Burress
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• ISBN: 1576754375
• Date: January 2007
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 128
• Cover Price:12pt”> USD: $19.95 Amazon: $13.57

Recently, a client who supported Web standards worked to design her newsletters to use cascading style sheets (CSS) for layouts instead of tables. Designers cheered. Readers jeered. One problem with this approach: email clients.

Outlook may dominate, but how many of us have second or third email accounts with Web-based email clients like Yahoo!, Hotmail, GMail and so on? Then you have email applications on handheld devices, and those on corporate networks using applications like LotusNotes. Some people use their Web host’s Web-based email client so they can check email from any computer, typically with one of three: SquirrelMail, Horde or NeoMail.

Then there are those who opt to use different computer-based software like Thunderbird, Mozilla, Eudora, PocoMail, The Bat! and Pegasus.

The problem

With only a handful of email clients, newsletters come across perfectly; when using the majority of email clients, newsletters are readable but not perfect; with other email clients, newsletters render a mess. To understand why this happens means understanding hypertext markup language (HTML) and CSS.

Instead of going into tech-speak, think of the DVD player. Any DVD can work in any DVD player, for the most part. True, all DVDs may not be compatible with every type of player, but let’s just say: DVD players look different and have their unique features, but they all do the same thing — play DVDs. Think of email clients as DVD players and emails as DVDs. Also, think of Web browsers as DVD players and Web sites as DVDs.

To continue the analogy, HTML is the language that enables different DVD players to play the same DVD. In a newsletter, it specifies how the design should look. The CSS tells the DVD player how to present the images, sound and titles. In a newsletter, CSS defines how the content appears in the newsletter complete with colors, fonts and layout.

The way email clients and Web browsers work is that the “DVDs” play, but not the same way. One might play email or Web site in grayscale. Another translates the text into a different language. Another doesn’t play images.

See Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 is what the newsletter is supposed to look like. Figure 2 is how it “gets read” by GMail, a Web-based email client. The images have been pixilated out of respect for the publication — as the poor readability is not the fault of the publisher.

[Click images to view larger in a new window]

The options

What can you do to have your newsletters be easily read? Keep the HTML design as simple as possible. The more bells and whistles, the more different it will appear than the original design. The first thing to do is accept that your newsletter will not look identical to every subscriber. Once you let go of the concept of a perfect layout, you’ll feel more at ease and know your newsletter’s style will vary.

When designing an HTML-based newsletter, you have three approaches to take:

1. Plain HTML: Use only HTML to style every item in the newsletter and no CSS.

2. Internal CSS: The CSS appears in the head of the newsletter’s HTML template.

3. External CSS: The CSS appears in a separate file that lives on a Web server. If the user is not connected to the Internet, the styles won’t appear.

As reported by E-Zine Tips, Lyris conducted a test and discovered that inline HTML had the best render rate at 94 percent. In the test, Lyris used three items with 36 email clients, both Web-based and computer-based. These results aren’t surprising.

Therefore, an external CSS is strongly advised against because it relies on a live Internet connection and the Web server working. You never know when readers view your emails, especially if they save old issues. If you delete the external CSS from the server and they try to read an old newsletter, it’s going to get messy.

Internal CSS don’t have the Web server problem. However, many email clients don’t correctly translate CSS based on W3C recommendations. And there’s the problem of when users update their software-based email clients, since updating software in companies isn’t usually an easy and smooth process.

The compromise

How do you ensure your newsletter comes across well? The ideal way is to offer HTML and text versions of your newsletter. Also, having online newsletter archives works great. When you have archives, potential readers can check out your newsletter to see if they want to subscribe.

Another work around is to include a text line at the VERY TOP of the newsletter that says, “Having trouble reading this? Read it online” and include the link to the online version of the newsletter.

If offering a choice of HTML and text isn’t possible, a simple newsletter created with clean HTML should work fine. Again, the newsletter may not look identical to all your readers, but the important thing is that the content is there and readable.

If you get an email with the above in the Subject without looking to see who sent it — what do you think? Considering I was swamped during that time, I jumped out of my seat. I always make an effort to beat my deadlines and probably because of all the things going on at work and at home — it made me more sensitive to my workload and schedule.

This was in an email mailing between newsletters from The Publicity Hound. Joan Stewart sends stuff between newsletters from time to time. So I emailed her about it thinking maybe it would’ve hurt more than helped to have such a headline.

But she provided a different perspective I had not considered. She said, “That subject line was intended for people who need a ‘heads up’ about deadlines. Had I not put that in the subject line, I would have heard, ‘Why didn’t you tell us we had to order by 5 p.m. Friday? Had I known that, I would have opened the email immediately. Now I’ve missed out on the discount!’”

Fair enough. Those who weren’t interested were more likely to hit the Delete key and move on. I guess being a newsletter editor made me want to respond and it reinforced the lesson of the importance of knowing your audience. She knew her audience well enough to know that it would work for most. So I’m the odd gal out in that audience.

Ack! I started off the day with 2500 email messages! 2450 of it spam. Someone used meryl.net to send spam. The sender name had all kinds of first and last names, so my inbox (the catch-all for meryl.net. A catch-all email address gets all emails that have been misspelled or don’t exist.) got all the delivery and confirmation failures.

I make my main email address the catch-all since I check that box most frequently. Hmm, maybe I need to change it to route it elsewhere so I don’t deal with all this garbage.

Why did a spammer choose meryl.net? It’s not like I’m a big company with lots of email addresses like yahoo.com or aol.com. I’m just a little one-person biz.

It’s been a long time since it happened, but I got a few angry emails telling me to stop spamming the recipient. But I haven’t seen those in a long time and meryl.net has been used a few times since. So I hope that means Internet users have a better understanding that spammers rarely use their own email addresses.

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox discusses newsletter usability and the competition for user attention. Nilesen reports that the original findings remain true today: “email newsletters are the best way to maintain customer relationships on the Internet.”

I love newsletters as a marketing tool. Done right, you provide valuable information to readers without annoying them with sales-speak. I try to focus on building relationships and let the chips fall.

One problem with some newsletters is the difficulty in unsubscribing to the newsletter. Keeping readers who don’t want your newsletter is not worth it. It’s a waste of money to email readers who want nothing to do with the newsletter. If they’re gonna delete it, then make it quick and painless to get off your list.
(more…)

Head boss of InternetVIZ, Hank Stroll, forwarded an email that was an auto reply:

Due to large amounts of spam I am receiving I have abandoned email as a means of business communications. You must contact me at the office at ###-###-#### to correspond with me.

Whoo, drastic move. Will more people do this? Yes. Will email go away. No. But it’s funny because I emailed a friend about my daughter’s lunch account in which someone was stealing her money. I stepped away from the PC (yes, I really do that) and she called a few minutes after I sent the email.

She tells Paul email is too slow and get on IM (instant messenger). She wanted to details on the theft. So people get frustrated with email because of the garbage that comes with it and because it’s too slow.

I often wonder how different my life as a teen would’ve been if email and IM were used as widely as it is today. I used email, but it was a geeks only thing at the time. What teen wants to call her friends with Mom and Dad helping her on the phone? Exactly.

From the sponsor: Rhinoplasty, better known as nose job, isn’t just for the vain.

We hear messages like “Do email newsletters!” “Start a blog!” “Build a forum!” “Provide a feed!” These sound like each is the only thing we should do to add content to Web sites. The way to go is to diversify your content. Invest a little here and a little there for a better return on your emarketing efforts.

Read about diversifying content and how to show clients you care in the February issue of eNewsletter Journal.

February ends tomorrow! Time to get moving!

From the sponsor: Diesel Jeans don’t have gasoline in them. The link takes you to a blog gives the lowdown on Diesel.