MindComet

Fishing for Emails

For the past two weeks I have been signing up for as many email lists as possible. I’ve opted in to receive emails from companies that vary from video game publishers to car manufacturers to fast food restaurants. In that time, I have subscribed to a total of 270 lists. And I’m not stopping there… I am hoping to sign up for 1,500 separate lists before the end of the year.

From signing up for all of these lists recently, I’ve noticed a few things… the most glaring thing being the sign-up process.  I was shocked to discover how some web sites actually make this a chore for potential users.  In some cases it was really frustrating. It felt like I was begging Brand X to let me opt-in. Some sign-up forms were so buried within their sites that it took me minutes to find them.  Although, I did feel accomplished afterwards.  It’s the closest I think I’ve ever come to being Sherlock Holmes.  But I digress… First let’s go over the logical ways to opt-in:

1 form on main page
2 register / become user
3 link in navigation
4 call to action

Example:

More often than not, however, I would dig and dig and dig in order to find something that resembled an opt-in form.  Take Caterpillar’s site for example… I went to their main page and found nothing resembling an opt-in for email. So I navigated to their contact page... nope, no opt-in form there. Then I reverted to their site map page. Once there, I was bowled over by the amount of pages are on this site. So instead of eyeballing each link, I began searching the text (apple+f) for keywords such as newsletter, subscribe, mail & member. “Mail Alerts” was the winner. I was then able to sign up and proceeded to wipe the sweat from more forehead.

Another example of a botched sign up process was found on GM’s site. GM was unique in the fact that they didn’t even have an opt-in form.  From searching through their site for “newsletter”, I came across their Corporate Responsibility newsletter. In order to sign up, you have to email them and request the newsletter. To specify your format preference, you had to include it in the subject line. Ridiculous. No wonder they’re going under.

Is it just me or is it shocking how these huge corporations show such a lack of interest in reaching out to their customers?  Can anyone else out there comment on any sites where it’s nearly impossible to sign up for an eNewsletter?

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 28, 2009

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