Welcome everyone, to the first installment of The Email Gnome. I’ll be giving you tips and tricks to make your email blasts faster, better, and more reliable.
 
Being a gnome, I’m a fan of all things small, and email blasts are no exception.

Small is beautiful.

The larger an email blast is, the longer it takes to send, and the longer it takes for your recipients to download. Large emails also increase the suspicion of spam blockers and filters, and increase complaint rates because of downloads timing out.

The optimum size for an email blast is under about 25 Kilobytes (KB), and the maximum size of an email blast is about 250 KB. As an example, a recent Friday Fiesta email was about 8 KB.

In terms of size restrictions, don't worry much about text: type away until your heart’s content, and you won't have to worry about your e-blast being too big. (I'd keep it brief, as your supporters are unlikely to want to read a novel in their inbox. But if they did want to, you could send an entire text version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and it would top out at only 177 KB!)

Where you really get into trouble is with pictures and images, especially the high-resolution ones that you or someone else took with a fancy digital camera. While these look awesome on your computer screen, they can slow email to a crawl.
 
Which brings us to today’s topic: image resizing.

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We dropped our last intermittent e-mail newsletter a couple weeks ago, and between the reminder of the upcoming user conference and the introductions of all our new staff members ... we reckoned we'd go put them online. You'll find it living on our newsletter signup box on the sidebar, too.

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In the world of email delivery, your IP address reputation is what it's all about. In days past, all you had to do was ensure that the emails going out of your system were clean, and the spam filters would pass them through into inboxes. Now, Internet Service Providers keep volumes of data on your IP addresses and what kind of email you send through them. They also keep data on frequency, volume, bounce count, and spam complaints. In order to optimize email deliverability, one must not only ensure that emails have non-spam-like content, but also that one keeps bounce counts and complaints low: if your IP drops e-mail to 10,000 bogus Yahoo addresses, Yahoo's going to assume the other 10,000 good addresses are receiving junk and handle it accordingly. Our member organizations control the first part of that equation, and (by being ethical mailers and not uploading spam lists) a portion of the second. But a very big part of keeping bounce counts and spam complaints within ISPs' operational limits happens out of DIA's shop through processes to automatically unsubscribe addresses that have gone sour.

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Email. Its a pretty basic thing. You want to say "Hey" to our friend and invite him over for the game. So, you fire up that streamlined AJAX-y web client and fire off an email. Your friend gets the email, he says he'll bring the chips and beverages if you'll supply the main course and the TV. He'll even bring a few of his friends and that will be great. You reply back to his reply and the event is set. "What did we ever do without email?," you think. Then, the light bulb appears. "I'd bet we can apply this to what we do at work and I'd be a hero!", you say aloud. Unfortunately, you have only seen the tip of the cold, cold monolithic iceberg that is email deliverability.

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The Progressive Exchange conversation about mailing frequency I mentioned last week got a longer writeup at Care2's Frogloop detailing the harmful effects of not communicating often enough. Too cold! This morning, e-mail shop MailChimp reports on the inverse case of a client who pressed open rates from monthly to twice-monthly to twice-weekly and saw open rates drop by three-quarters, referencing another report of a commercial mailer who did better by doing less. Too hot! Test, test, test. There's just no substitute for sampling every bowl of porridge to find out for yourself what's just right.

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Ordinarily being the kind of insufferable nitpick to chafe at minor spelling infringements, I was surprised to learn that the master login page I've been using for going on two years now ... well, it ... Amazingly, none of the other 10+ folks who use this page -- many of them daily, for thousands (at least) of combined page views among them -- noticed the typo in glaring h1 font either, until someone went to access it through a handheld and was forced by the unfamiliar display to, as it were, read it anew.

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