We are currently evaluating a number of e-mail marketing services for InterNACHI and NACHI.TV, and I thought I’d post the list here. They are in no particular order.
I’ll be posting full reviews as we finish evaluating them. Right now I’m most impressed with AWeber, Campaign Monitor, MailChimp and newsberry, but iContact and MagnetMail have been suggested to me by a few people, and I haven’t looked at demos of all of ‘em yet. We’re also looking into a service called AuthSMTP which handles the delivery and lets you sort out the mailing system. So far it’s been fantastic for our bulletin board and other systems that have mail integration.
A project I’m working on needs to output text that may have e-mail addresses in it to the Web. Because we don’t want people’s e-mail addresses exposed to spammers, I had to write an obfuscation class to make sure those e-mail addresses are hidden somehow. I haven’t decided what method to hide those addresses with yet (I’m leaning towards Mailhide), but I thought I’d post the base code now. The class is written so that you can extend it to hide the addresses however you like. Here’s the class (PHP 5 only, but would be easy to convert to PHP 4).
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Sometimes I realize something that’s so obvious that I actually slap my forehead and say, “duh.” I had one of those moments this morning:
I use IMAP for all my e-mail accounts because I love the access-anywhere freedom it provides. But there’s definitely an associated lag with just about everything because you have to talk to the server to do it. Particularly when trying to reach Inbox Zero, this can be a major pain, because the half-second that I have to wait for a message to move from my Inbox to, say, my Action-1 (requires action, high priority) folder can really add up over a few hundred messages.
Well this morning I had this great (and blindingly obvious) idea to process e-mail “Offline.” Almost all e-mail clients have the option to download your messages, make changes/write emails offline, and then send and “do” all those changes once you get back online. Well, you don’t have to actually be offline to enjoy this feature. Not only is manipulating IMAP mail instantaneous, but you also have the added benefit that no new mail comes in to distract you from the task or sorting old mail. Genius!
I feel like I must be the last person on earth to discover this fantastic tool, but just in case I’m not, I wanted to share it with the world. Best case scenario, someone else gets to hit their forehead and say, “duh.” If nothing else, everyone who figured this out 5 years ago can have a good laugh at my expense.
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