Erich Stauffer

Tag: Email

  • Email is Dead, Long Live Email

    You’ll find a low rumbling in the hacker community about how email is broken 1, 2 (or not broken 3, 4). Email is still the main communication medium on the planet besides Facebook, SMS, and the web’s attempts to change that. The problem is that it is still relatively unsecure, it is generally heavily filtered at the server and local level, and can’t do advanced (yet simple) things like embed video.

    Attempts to *fix* email have resulted in new platforms like Google Wave or Facebook Messages, but people are so heavily invested in their current email readers (Outlook, Gmail) that making a new platform for email is not really wanted. So what I’m proposing is to make new systems for the people who DO want it and NOT for the masses.

    I’m a web marketer. I want to be able to send out cool emails. I want my clients to be able to send out cool emails too. I define “cool” as being able to easily create and manage your own custom email signatures and be able to send active content like embedded videos (a la BombBomb email). This can be done through various services and programs today, but it’s piecemeal.

    I’m envisioning creating a marketing portal like Salesforce.com for managing your online marketing. It’d be a cloud platform for people to login, send marketing messages, add to or edit their blog, manage their marketing message response rate, and other CRM-like functions from a marketing-centric side of things – instead of a sales-centric side of things. Maybe it’s not needed. It’s just an idea.

    Read about my other idea of creating a reputation service for the Internet.

  • On Developing Our Professional Email Signature Product

    Recently, like Seth Godin suggested, we started looking for way to “redefine a service as a product”.

    We’ve found that custom HTML email signatures was a way to use our web design and email management skills to create  an introductory product that’s great for a wide variety of clients. Our typical clients are independent business owners or non-profits who can make their own marketing decisions, but now we have a product that can help franchisees or real estate agents who don’t or can’t have their own web site, but do have control over their email signature.

    Email signatures provide a way to offer increased interaction, coupons, calls to action, and integration with review sites, business directories, social media sites, and home pages. They can be inserted into many of the major web based email programs as well as traditional email clients. The images can be hosted on your web server or ours.

    We’ve considered branding for the email signatures can range from “mini-web sites at the end of your email” or “custom HTML email signatures”. When we do keyword research for doing our SEO, keyword terms like, “professional email signatures,” “email signatures for business”, and others come up so we might use those.

    On our home page, we currently have a huge image of the email signatures product with a giant button that says, “Learn More”. This is in response to feedback we got about our old page design which lacked a central call to action. In the future, we’d like to have that central image and text swap out in what’s called a “content slider”.

    This is a new product for us and we’re still doing customer development and looking for feedback. We’ve done many customer interviews and implemented a lot of what we heard in order to continue to iterate the product. The end product may change from where it is now, but so far, it’s shaping up to be something people really like.

  • How to Auto-Forward Text Messages to Email in Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, and the iPhone

    It may seem counter-intuitive to some to forward a SMS message to an email address when most devices that can receive text messages can also receive email, but sometimes you don’t have access to your phone, yet you still need access to the text messages. This could happen if you lose your phone, leave your phone at work or in the car, or simply not be able to bring it to work or some other restricted location.

    I personally started using it when my customers started texting me long requests that I’d have to retype or manually forward to get into a usable form on my computer. It could also be useful for those of you who run a business on the side and want to keep your day job. You can use tools like this to forward text messages as emails to a personal assistant or your partner. For whatever the reason, you’re probably here looking for the answer, just like I was before I found the solution.

    Below are solutions for how to auto-forward your text messages to email for Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, and Apple iPhones.

    Android Phones

    TextBusy by Gatehill Software – $1.23

    I use TextBusy, which works great. It requires you to use a Gmail account to forward the emails so all of the SMS messages will be coming to you from whatever address you specify. Whatever bad reviews you see out there from August – disregard as those have been fixed by now as you can see by the latest review on September 15th. For $1.23 it’s well worth the money. It currently has 9 reviews on the Android Market.

    txtForward by Electric Pocket – $3.19

    txtForward txtForward automatically sends a copy of your SMS text messages to any email address you specify, for backup or as a handy way to get your messages at your desk.
    Send your SMS messages automatically to any email address, and easily back them up or read them from your desktop email client. It’s available for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile too. It currently has 38 reviews on the Android Market.

    SMS2Gmail by EireApps – FREE

    SMS2Gmail forwards SMS and missed call information to Gmail account. This application allows you to forward your SMS messages and missed calls to a user defined gmail account, and you can activate it remotely. If your phone is at home for example and you are not, send it an SMS from a friends phone or webtext and activate this service. It currently has 57 reviews on the Android Market.

    Blackberry Phones

    SMS Auto Forward to Email Pro by Value Apps – $3.99

    SMS Auto Forward to Email lets you forward all incoming SMS messages to an email address automatically. Very handy if you keep changing your handsets or like to delete your text messages. Keep a log/backup of all your text messages. Once installed and running, you don’t need to do anything. The app runs in the background and send every incoming text message automatically to an email address of your choice.

    txtForward automatically sends a copy of your SMS text messages to any email address you specify, for backup or as a handy way to get your messages at your desk.
    Send your SMS messages automatically to any email address, and easily back them up or read them from your desktop email client.

    Windows Mobile

    txtForward automatically sends a copy of your SMS text messages to any email address you specify, for backup or as a handy way to get your messages at your desk.
    Send your SMS messages automatically to any email address, and easily back them up or read them from your desktop email client.

    Palm Pre

    SMS Auto Forward/Reply by Grabber Software

    NOTE: This app does not work on webOS 2.x. SMS Auto Forward/Reply forwards text messages to the mobile number of your choice (number must be in your contacts). You can also send an auto-reply message to the sender. Your phone must be turned on and in coverage for this application to work. While this isn’t text-to-email, it may be the best a Palm Pre user can get. If you know of another app for Pre’s let us know in the comments.

    Apple iPhones

    Unfortunately, there are no apps to auto-forward text message from the iPhone (this is an opportunity for app developers!). For iPhones using firmware 3.0 or higher, manual forwarding of SMS messages is a built-in feature. To manually forward a text message, simply:

    1. view the SMS text message you’d like to forward
    2. select EDIT at the top of the screen
    3. check off the message(s) you’d like to forward
    4. tap FORWARD at the bottom right of the screen

    iSMS/weiSMS

    For those using older firmware, there is a third-party application for the iPhone, iSMS/weiSMS, with which it is possible to send text messages to multiple individuals as well as forward text messages.

    SMSD

    SMSD is a free and easy to use iPhone SMS management application which lets you delete individual Messages, backup all message through mail, manually forward messages, and manually Send/Forward messages to multiple contacts.

  • Email Missing?

    It’s possible for email to not be delivered when spam filters anywhere along the line detect and remove spam server-side. There are two ways this can happen. One way is if the email itself is blocked by a filter. The other way is if an entire organization is filtered for a history of sending emails like in the first example.

    The spam you see in Gmail is just a fraction of your actual spam. Most is pre-filtered and you don’t even have the chance to see it. Spam filters have white, black, and gray lists.

    • White lists allow every server on it to send them mail.
    • Black lists are the opposite, blocking all mail from servers on the list.
    • Gray lists are like white, but are built when an email is sent from your server to theirs, meaning, to prevent blocking, send an email to them first.

    Good practices to avoid a spam filter are to keep your first email to a person “link and attachment”-free. For example, if you want to send an attachment to someone you’ve never written before, simply ask if you can send them an attachment first and then wait for their reply. Once they reply you are on their gray list.

    Having said all that, there has been a DNS attack going on lately that exploits a bug found in BIND. There’s a chance that the email crossed through a network mode affected by the attack and it went to the wrong server.

    The most likely cause though is human error where the email address was typed in wrong OR a new device or app was added to check their mail and it wasn’t configured to “leave messages on the server” making them exist only on the device that got their first.

    One thing to do is to change their password in case their account has been compromised.

    If the organization you are on has been marked as being too spammy, you may have no other option than to switch hosts or email providers. We recommend switching to Google Apps and support Google Apps for most of our clients.

  • Email Pitches

    I wanted to share with you some things I learned at the Blog Indiana 2011 conference about email pitches. I think it will be helpful for you in the future. I learned them from Casey Mullins, who is a successful mommy blogger in Indiana.

    First, tell them what you can do for them, then how it will benefit them. Be humble and concise. Explain what you wish to get out of the communication and how they can contact you. This is kind of like the old saying, “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Today for them, tomorrow for you.

    Next, it’s best to greet each contact personally, but if you do send out a mass email, use the BCC line instead to protect the privacy of your email list. Also, attachments may cause your email to get filtered out as spam so its best to send those in a follow up email or send links instead.

    If you are just starting out, you might find Guy Kawasaki’s book, The Art of the Start, useful. If you buy the book through that link, I’ll get a percent of the purchase price of that and anything else you buy at Amazon.com as a commission, but another good resource is Startup Marketing or Seth Godin’s Blog.

  • Email Expectations

    Customer: I need a website for my business so I do a web search for a web design company to make it and I look at the work that they have done before I ever consider price. I judge what their prices might be based on the site and their work. I might put a feeler email out there or call for information, but I don’t want to commit in any way. I want information without commitment.

    Us: Emailing or calling us amounts to an information request only. Any commitment comes with a contract, which only occurs after you’re comfortable and ready to get started. We won’t be sending out a newsletter or cold calling you, nor will we be sharing your information with anyone else. We value your privacy and the privacy of your project. However, all of our customers receive a monthly email detailing any software updates and/or testing we have done that month in addition to a detailed report about your website’s traffic.

  • Microsoft Updates Hotmail

    Although Hotmail popularized web-based email, it has fallen behind the competitors Yahoo and Google in features

    Down, but not out, Hotmail is still used by millions of people around the world and is still a critical aspect of Microsoft’s online business strategy, especially as Microsoft moves more into the cloud with its more traditional revenue models like Microsoft Office, which is releasing version 2010 this year. Hotmail is particularly useful to non-english speaking users because of its large language support and according to Comscore its still the most used web email with 360 million users compared to Yahoo’s 300 million and Gmail’s 200 million. Still, Hotmail hasn’t changed much since Microsoft bought it in late 1997. This was after starting up in 1996 and garnering over 9 million users.

    So what is changing?

    Microsoft announced that this summer they will begin rolling out new, advanced features that are akin to what Gmail users are used to:

    • The option for viewing emails as conversations (although the default will still be as single emails)
    • Automatic filter buttons to filter emails from people on your contact list, emails from social networks, shopping sites, and others.
    • Larger attachment sizes, up to 10 GB using Microsoft’s SkyDrive

    One thing that remains the same is the huge banner ads running alongside your email, ala 1996, in addition to the text ad tagged onto all of your emails beneath your signature. That is, unless you pay $20 a year to remove the ads.

    Our First Web Email

    Despite all it’s shortcomings, we still have a spot in our heart for Hotmail, which provided me with my first personal email account, which I still have, back in 1997.