(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday!)

It's the "Weekly Salsa Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program -- in fact, your first Weekly Salsa Highlight of 2010. As always, check out Salsa Commons for news, updates, and conversation every day.

We've got many exciting upgrades on the way, but I thought we'd start the year off highlighting an existing feature that's not as well-known as it should be.

Auto-Generate Text Email from HTML Content

It's always important to take advantage of Salsa's ability to send both marked-up HTML versions and plain-text versions of email blasts, or the minority of your subscribers whose email inboxes only allow plain text might end up with an empty email.

But does that mean writing two emails every single time you send?

Actually, it just means pressing a button.

In the "Content" step of your email blast builder, just tab over to "Text Content" and click "Auto-generate Text from HTML." You'll instantly have a plain-text version of your current HTML content, complete with bracketed hyperlinks. Tweak it from there to your liking (for many emails, further editing won't even be necessary), and voila!