Resize Pictures Before You Upload Them
If we hear any complaints about newsletters (and we don't very often), it is that large images can take a long time to download. Even a delay of a few seconds can mean the difference between someone reading your email and the click of the delete key. To keep your HTML newsletter efficient, make sure the image files you upload are small in file size and dimension. The best place to reduce the size of your image file is through a paint program like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or our favorite ULEAD's PhotoImpact. Use this program to decrease the number of colors in the image and to resize the image in pixels to fit well within the newsletter page. A good rule is for photos/graphics uploaded into an article a width of 150 pixels is a good place to start.
When is a Bounce not a Bounce?
The bounce manager collects all email that is returned to it. In most cases, an email is returned because either the email domain is no longer valid (or is misspelled) or the email account at that domain is no longer active. These bounces are classified as "Bad Email Address". Sometimes a message is returned if the recipient's mail box quota has been exceeded. A bounce classified as "Mail Box Full" is not necessarily a bad email address. However, if the mail box remains full and bounces are received more than once, you may consider this to be a bad address. You can then have the bounce manager remove addresses that have bounced more than once from your subscriber list.
The bounce manager does not collect email that is sent to the "Reply To" address. This is most often used by email programs that are in vacation mode. In these cases, you (the sender of the newsletter) will receive an automatic response indicating the reader is not available. This does not mean the newsletter bounced back without delivery and it does not mean the bounce manager is not working. In most of these cases, the email program is simply alerting the sender that the recipient is not available and the message is kept for them to read when they return.
Not every AOL user is the same!
Prior to AOL Version 6.0, AOL users were limited to only specially formatted text messages. With the recent upgrade of AOL from version 5.0 to version 6.0, a collection of new features were added which includes the ability to send and receive HTML formatted email messages. iMakeNews is one of the few systems that is smart enough to detect the difference between an AOL 5.0 user and an AOL 6.0 user. After sending your first newsletter, iMakeNews learns which version is being used. Subsequent editions of your newsletter will then be delivered as fully formatted HTML to subscribers using AOL 6.0 and specially formatted plain text to subscribers using AOL 5.0.
