How do you deal with telling all your clients you’ll be on vacation, that you’re offering a new service or special rates, or any other important piece of news for that matter? What if you’d like to send out a regular e-newsletter? Without certain programming skills, it’s a challenge. And not all of us web workers are programmers.
I have a new toy, and today is Show and Tell.
The company is CampaignMonitor. I looked around for easy-to-use and affordable options for sending mass html e-mails and found plans that were too expensive for my needs, or tools that required more IT knowledge than I had. I needed to send a nice-looking e-mail newsletter to members of the social network I launched because the mass e-mail feature included with the platform I use is just pathetic.
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Sometimes Outlook is a necessary evil. Personally I prefer Thunderbird if I’m going to be using a desktop client, because it’s less cluttered, not to mention free. Still, when I’m at the office working as a contractor for a professional services firm, Outlook 2007 on Windows XP is the standard email client, so I have to make do.
Making do just got a lot easier thanks to Taglocity 2.0, a plugin which brings some much needed functionality to Microsoft’s Office-based desktop email program.
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Y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with an AOL Mail email address…plenty of AIM users, but no one with AOL Mail - at least no one who will admit it…
Regardless, there must be a good number of such users, to encourage AOL to develop a plugin that enables their users to collect mail from Yahoo!’s email service, a plugin which launched late last week.
Inline with AOL’s recent strategy at the AOL.com home page to embrace and integrate third party content and services within their own properties, Yahoo’s messaging behemoth is now available - albeit as message previews only - within the AOL Mail interface. Users can then click through to their corresponding message at the Yahoo! service.
It’s all kinda, um, underwhelming and the kind of feature that should have been there all along; an indictment of the ‘data prison’ strategies employed by web’s largest properties.
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I believe that there are two types of email users in the world - Filers and Finders.
Sure, these categories can apply to us in a lot of areas but I see this polarization most frequently with how we use and store our email. Because we amass such a large amount of data in our email clients, being able to locate and retrieve it quickly is certainly important.
How we go about that certainly differs.
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Recently, I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MSI Wind netbook to get a feel for a 10-inch Apple notebook. The device came with Windows XP pre-installed and I have it running Vista for the moment. Yes, I’m generally OS-agnostic. One of the challenges I had to address with a small display using only 1024×600 resolution was screen real estate, so I did something I don’t often do: I set the Mac OS X Dock to auto-hide. It provided me more room for my tasks but it also took away one of my most important bits of visual information: the unread count from my two Gmail Inboxes in Mail.
I’m generally not a huge fan of plug-ins due to performance challenges, but I’m making an exception for Mail Unread Menu. This 2.2MB free application for Mac OS X 10.4 or better does one thing, but does it well. It places a configurable icon in the Mac menu bar that shows the total number of unread e-mails waiting for me. You can pick and choose which mailboxes it monitors, modify the menu bar icon and even show the subject lines of unread e-mails to give you a preview before moving your attention to the Mail application.
I also use Growl for e-mail notifications, but that’s more of a real-time information updater. Sometimes, I don’t want to see every single e-mail coming in and just want to check the count every so often. With Mail Unread Menu, I can ignore the Growl and the Dock on my smaller-screened device but still keep my finger on the pulse of my information lifeblood. Now if I could just convince Apple to make a netbook similar in size to my MSI Wind, I wouldn’t have to cobble together my own.
Due to the nature of my work evaluating the Skype ecosystem’s software, web-based applications and a variety of smartphones, I not only have to use Outlook as a primary reference address book for synchronizing contact information but also end up constipating the registry of my Windows installation about once a year.
It eventually gets to a point where I have to backup all my documents and application data and rebuild Windows. I had reached this point a couple of weeks ago. But this time it happened at an opportune time when I found the local Staples was selling Office 2007 Small Business Edition upgrade at a 40% discount.
Having seen favorable reviews and had limited experience with other Office 2007 modules on a recently purchased desktop (that serves as a backup PC), I bought. Now my laptop’s Outlook operation runs much more smoothly and quickly as a result; it boils down to “search”.
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As Google deepened its support for offline access via IMAP this week, Zoho, its closest competitor in the web office space, was publicly unveiling its own support for offline and access, ironically using Google’s own Gears platform.
Curiously Zoho decided that to bring users’ mailboxes offline, Gears was a better technological platform for offline access than the IMAP protocol; though we’re assured IMAP is coming.
Regardless, the offline features seem pretty comprehensive despite currently being restricted to Gears for Firefox and Internet Explorer and with most online features being available offline - messages, images & attachments are optionally available and a clever connectivity detection feature automatically determines whether a network is visible, flipping between offline and online modes as appropriate, with offline messages queued for later deliver when connectivity becomes available.
A Gears configuration dialog allows users to select the number of messages to download initially, how many Sent Items should be stored for offline access.
Finally, though Zoho is pitching mobile access alongside offline support, in reality Zoho Mail is currently only optimised for the iPhone.
Though the offline support appears to work well enough - as do other Gears-enabled services such as Google Reader - mainstream offline access seems a little too fragmented for comfort.
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Gmail, a staple of our work environment, becomes a little more like “big-boy” IMAP courtesy of Google Labs. Hit the Labs button in your Gmail account and you’ll see a new “Advanced IMAP Controls” function. Enable it and you can begin to take advantage of the following new features:
- Auto-Expunge: it sounds like a dirty word, but expunging is a good thing for data that’s no longer needed. Up to now, Gmail would simply mark items for deletion in clients and not immediately delete them. Enabling the Auto-Expunge feature kicks those deleted messages to the curb and gets them out of your e-mail system.
- Delete Forever: one the benefits of Gmail is that like an elephant, it never forgets. All of your mail is archived in the Gmail / All Mail label or folder unless you manually clean it out. This often results in wasted space, messages in multiple locations and more bandwidth required for mail synching. You can now expunge mail forever by setting Gmail to simply move it to Trash upon deletion.
- Selective Syncing: you can now pick and choose which labels or folders you want synchronized between Gmail and your web or desktop client. This comes in handy for archived folders that don’t change much. For example, I still want my “CES 2008″ folder data, but I don’t need to see it every waking minute of the day. I’ve disabled that one for now because I’ve got an active “CES 2009″ folder for planning purposes.
Each of these features can be useful, but for me the ability to say good-bye to the All Mail label usage is key. I often work remotely over wireless broadband connections where there’s a 5GB monthly data cap and 1.5-hours of work already uses near 45MB. Why should I be synching the near 53,000 e-mails in my All Mail folder when I’m already managing the ones I need with custom labels?
