With our newly introduced TinyMCE editor, that’s what you get. The new editing module, available free for CakeMail users, can be embedded into your site and used to lock down what clients can change within a message. That means more flexibility and independence for your customers … and less time spent fixing things!

TinyMCE comes with some other great features, like image management and cropping, that make it easier than ever to build great campaigns. You can check out the new module here.

(Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/pathayes/3208430981/)

La traducción ha sido completada por nuestro socio Citymail en Méjico que ofrece ahora el servicio de CakeMail a sus clientes.

CakeMail se encuentra actualmente disponible en 9 idiomas, incluyendo inglés, francés, español, alemán, griego, ruso, rumano, estonio y holandés.

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We’re very proud to announce that CakeMail’s email marketing software is now available in Spanish. Latin American, Hispanic American and all others Spanish-speaking customers will be pleased to use the full CakeMail application in their own language.

The translation has been completed by our partner Citymail in Mexico who is now offering CakeMail’s service to its clients.

CakeMail is currently available in 9 languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Greek, Russian, Romanian, Estonian and Dutch.

Take high-fiber diets. Or flossing. Or building a text-only version of your carefully-crafted emails. You know you need to do them, but they’re a nuisance.

Today, we’re adding the Quicktext Conversion module to the growing list of add-on modules available to CakeMail customers. With the click of a button, you can quickly generate a text version of your HTML message so that your emails have maximum impact regardless of whether they’re being seen on a modern email client, an older mail reader, or a mobile device.

As with all modules, Quicktext Conversion can be activated for one or all of your clients. Leaving you more time to floss.

CakeMail is looking for an operations engineer and Linux system administrator to handle its Linux-based infrastructure. If you’re looking to join a fast-growing software company and have the operations savvy to run a high-traffic, production-grade Internet platform, we want to hear from you.

Responsibilities:

• Install, configure, and maintain a Unix/Linux-based environment
• Deploy monitoring and logging tools to keep things running smoothly and reduce downtime
• Work with internal users and assist support teams with problem resolution when things go wrong
• Ensure redundant, highly available production systems using backups and load balancing
• Define, implement, and regularly test disaster recovery procedures
• Document security, disaster recovery, network topology, and maintenance procedures, avoiding surprises and ensuring that everyone’s on the same page

Skills & experience

• You should be intimately familiar with performance tuning in a Linux environment, writing scripts and compiling services such as Apache and PHP, as well as MySQL optimization.
• You should also be comfortable with network monitoring and TCP/IP, and know your way around a sniffer. You know how to tell why things are slow, and can read packet traces to get to the bottom of things—particularly when those things are VPNs, DNS, DHCP, NFS, SMTP (Postfix), and SNMP.
• You’ll be expected to maintain strict security practices including access control lists, regular patch regimens, version control management, and audits. You’ll also set up monitoring with Nagios or Cacti
• You’ll also understand the relationship between performance and load, and be able to join in capacity planning and budgeting exercises.
• You know how to work in a high-availability environment, relying on load-balancers, technologies like drbd and heartbeat, DNS management, clustering, and hot-hot database configurations to reduce the impact of outages on end users.

The right candidate will also be a self-starter, able to set their own priorities and own their part of the business, reporting to the executive team. Because of the international nature of the position and direct customer interaction, strong written and spoken English is required—but French is always an asset.

Make no mistake: This is a dynamic, exciting environment, with all the long hours, maintenance windows, and emergencies that entails. But if you’re in IT operations, you are already quite familiar with this responsibility. The upside is that this is also a chance to be part of the core team building a new Internet offering at one of Montreal’s hottest new technology companies. If you’re good at operations and have the backbone for the pace of hi-tech, let’s talk.

Cough Cough… gasp, What??! (correct, that’s 130 billion… I thought I’d add the zeros in there for some added affect)

This is a 30% increase from 2007. Scary stuff! but still, I think a pretty conservative estimate. It was calculated from operational costs and productivity loss from people inspecting/deleting spam and also from searching/retrieving legitimate email (false positives) deleted in error by spam filters. It seems a little hard to believe seeing all that has been done in the last 4 years to combat spam, but I guess it’s time to step it up.

Here are some more interesting statistics:

• # non-spam emails sent during 2006 by business email users: 6 trillion
• Estimated number of non-spam email messages sent worldwide each day 2006: 25 billion
• % of email messages sent daily that are spam messages: > 75%
• Typical # Internet emails sent and received by a business user: 600 per week
• Cost of a user deleting a spam message: $0.04
• Cost of a user retrieving a bona fide message erroneously deleted as spam (“false positive”): $3.50

This last one through me… no spam filter is perfect, there will always be legitimate mail that gets blocked, but I would be interested in knowing what percentage of this 130 bil is spent looking for false positives? Ferris, please don’t make us wait another 4 years. Keep up the good work!

Read the whole summary from Ferris Research

Want to calculate your own company’s cost of spam? Barracuda has a nifty Spam Cost Calculator

Bye for now,

Kevin

It would be great to have your comments!

Difference #1. Advanced permission is required
Difference #2. Permission is required for SMS messages
Difference #3. Unsubscribe links must stay active for 60 days
Difference #4. Unsubscribe requests must be honored within 10 days
Difference #5. Individuals have the right to sue spammers

Read the complete article: Canada’s Anti-Spam Bill: 5 Key Differences from CAN SPAM

Hi again, in my last post we talked a bit about reviving old lists and dealing with hardbounces, but I never really got into how important they are. Sure, most people know what a hardbounce is, but I don’t think many people know what kind of an impact sending to them can have on your deliverability.

Very simply a hardbounce is a bounce generated when you send an email to an address that does not exist. It may have existed in the past, but not anymore. Just like calling a phone number that’s been disconnected, you usually get a recording saying “This number is no longer in service..” – which is effectively the same thing. The big difference is, the phone company doesn’t block the rest of your outbound phone calls because you dialed too many wrong numbers!

ISPs look very closely at the number of hardbounces a sender generates. Too many from a given network can indicate a potential Directory Harvest Attack and ISPs will put up a block (usually done automatically) to prevent slow downs which may cause further harm to their users. Have you ever sent an email to a friend and wondered why it took so long to get there? Think about it, if an ISP is being bombarded by millions of spammers trying to validate a list of a ‘gagillion’ addresses, it’s going to slow down the legitimate email from getting through and people will inevitably start complaining.

In order to prevent these blocks, it’s very important to keep your list(s) up-to-date. This means sending on a regular basis and removing hardbounces as you go. CakeMail automatically does this for you, but if you haven’t used the list in a while or like we talked about last week, you’re thinking of using an older list, you need to be very careful. As a preventative measure, which we’ve also mentioned several times, you should be confirming any new leads. When somebody signs-up, you should (at the very least) be sending that address a Welcome email. Not only will this prove they have access to the address, but it will get rid of hardbounces right away and prevent you sending a whole bunch at once. It also gives you an excellent opportunity to send them your From address for Whitelisting and thank them for signing up in the first place!

Bye for now,

Kevin

If you have any questions, Kevin can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.

We know you’ve already planned to lose weight, quit smoking, and start exercising to improve your quality of life. And we don’t want to overwhelm you with MORE resolutions but simply having better email marketing practices can diminish your complaint rate and improve your deliverability, lowering your stress level and making your life in general better! Aren’t we thoughtful?

1. Emails are nothing without the appropriate permissions. Go for double opt-in.
2. Should we really tell you once more to NOT buy lists?
3. Keep your lists as up-to-date as possible. Delete all problem addresses and react quickly to unsubscribe requests.
4. Avoid using lists you haven’t used for more than a year. If you’ve stopped using a list for several months, it’s a good idea to send a request to subscribers, reconfirming their subscription prior to any other sending.
5. In the subscription process clearly explain what your users will receive and when. And allow your subscribers to unsubscribe easily.
6. Email subjects must be as clear as possible. Don’t take the chance of getting mixed up with spam. And picking an attractive subject line will make your readers eager to open your email.
7. In your emails have a clear sender name and address, and always use the same ones.
8. Ask your subscribers to add your email address to their contact list so you won’t end up in their spam box.
9. Respect your users and the rules you agreed to when they subscribed to your email. Go further than the rules set up by the CAN-SPAM Act, or at least respect them.
10. Make good content! No one will complaint about receiving interesting content.

Whitelisting 101 on CakeMail and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group - MAAWG Senders Communications Practices Guide (PDF download) will help you keep your resolutions.

Have a great, successful and healthy year in 2009!