MindComet

Mobile Email Usage On The Rise

According to a recent study conducted by Campaign Monitor, mobile email is on the rise. Now this shouldn’t be much of a surprise as mobile devices are becoming more and more prominent pretty much everywhere in the world, but what is surprising is the rate at which mobile use is rising.

With the release of the iPhone, iPad and Android phones, the mobile market share has gone from 4% to 20% in 24 months. This, to me, is insanely quick growth. Of that 20%, iPhone unsurprisingly accounts for the vast majority with iPad and Android falling behind in pecking order. Even more alarming is the rate at which Desktop clients such as Outlook, Apple Mail and the like have dropped: almost 11%.

Go here and check out this fantastic article. It’s well worth your time.

If this isn’t evidence for more mobile-centric email designs, I don’t know what is. If your ESP allows for a mobile alternative, be sure to utilize it.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 16, 2011

Quick Tip About ALT Text

I learn something new just about everyday through Ros at CampaignMonitor. This time, regarding ALT text. If your ALT text exceeds the width for the image with some email clients, that alt text will fail to show up. Those email clients include Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail, iPhone, Gmail and Apple Mail. So keep your alt text short and sweet.

If you aren’t already, take the extra effort to style each main image with ALT text. Make ALT text of the corresponding header graphic larger with a color that coincides with the background color of said image. This really is basic stuff that’s simply overlooked most of the time. And don’t wrap header tags around the images with more pronounced ALT text. This causes rendering issues in some clients, so stick with basic CSS styling.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 05, 2010

Postbox - New Email Client Breaks the Mold

It’s taken me a little over six months to report on this, but better late than never, right?  I just recently started playing with Postbox this week. MindComet’s Director of Information Systems, Dean Proctor, was praising it all over Twitter, so I decided to give it a whirl.  I’ve been using Apple’s standard Mail client pretty exclusively for a few years now.  In that time, I’ve dabbled with other email clients here and there but I’ve never been too impressed with anything else until now.

Before I start digging into the goodies Postbox provides, I have to get my grievances out of the way…

For starters, a sound notification is absent when a new email has been received. I looked into this and my preferences are set to play a sound when something arrives, but my ear buds remains mute. Also, the only time the little red icon thingy appears in the dock is when an email is delivered only to my inbox folder.  If an email is directed into one of my many meticulously organized subfolders, there’s no visual notification.  This is annoying.  Postbox also seems to check the server less frequently than Apple Mail. On top of all of this, my email from Apple Mail failed to import and Postbox crashed on three separate occasions.  I don’t blame this entirely on Postbox, though.  I believe this was an isolated incident as I’ve had issues with my email in the past and my colleagues Dean and Patrick, who have also been using Postbox, experienced no problems.

So outside of these minor annoyances, Postbox is a KILLER mail app.

The most powerful feature is undoubtedly it’s search function. On top of searching for someone’s name or a specific subject line, you can also search for a specific file attachment. There’s also a menu consisting of attachment, images, links and contact tabs.  Click on either and a new tab will appear with all emails that fit it’s respective criteria.  You can also enter broad date-related queries such as “before July 2009”—not too shabby.

I asked Patrick to give me his thoughts on Postbox’s search functions:

Postbox is awesome because it harnesses the major power of Gmail: search. By indexing your email and using some very flexible searching algorithms it returns more results than any other email client I’ve used.

Message threading is a feature that almost made me smack my head and scream out “why didn’t anyone think of this before!?“  It keeps every related conversation organized by date within it’s own self-contained thread.

Postbox incorporates social media tie-ins unlike any other mail platform. It allows for posting and fetching information to and from Facebook and Twitter.

I haven’t used the topics feature yet.  But it’s more or less a way to tag your emails based on the content within.  I don’t have much use for it, but I can see how someone would have a use for it.

Composing an email is super easy and allows for attaching files or dropping links / images into an email with ease. All you have to do is click on one of the icons to the right of the composition window. If you click on the link icon, all of the links within any of the emails on your machine will be displayed. Drag & drop the ones you want to use. This goes for attachments, images, contacts, et cetera.

If you’re running an older and slower version of OS X, Postbox may not be ideal as it eats up memory.  210MB compared to Apple Mail’s 32MB. Postbox is based on Thunderbird’s powerful and robust framework and is free to download.  It’s not mutually exclusive either, as it’s available for both Windows and Mac.

From an email marketer’s point of view, this should eventually be added to your list of test clients. Since it’s based on Mozilla technology, you can pretty much guarantee that it is very forgiving in terms of rendering, so don’t beat yourself up over not testing on it immediately.

Has anyone else used Postbox? With all things considered, I think it’s a spectacular email app but I’m curious to see what everyone else thinks.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 03, 2009