E-Mail to the Editor
A European Perspective
"I was wondering if you could put a little bit more emphasis on the Internet web marketing world outside the US. sometimes what it is working in the US is not appropriate in Europe.... I believe lots of American companies would like to have insights on how things work in Europe as well." -- Maurizio Gazzola, London, England
Editor. Thanks for your suggestions. You're right. This is a need. I would appreciate it if all my European and Asian friends could contribute ideas and perspectives on marketing in their areas to the Web Marketing & E-Commerce Forum, Global Marketing Section. http://www.wilsonweb.com/forum/ I need your ideas.
Multipart HTML E-Mail
"I have been working on code to send plain text-, HTML-, or multi- formatted e-mail to users at their request for a future website, so your article was timely. A couple of things I noticed...
"First, although you can see it if your examples are examined carefully, it might not be obvious to a novice that the boundaries must start with "--" followed by the boundary string in the Content-Type header. That is why there are only four hyphens at the beginning of the boundary string, but six in the boundaries themselves.
"Also, if you are sending this type of e-mail to users, you should have them verify that the "View Attachments Inline" option is enabled to see the HTML version, otherwise, they will see the text version." -- Robert Simpson, www.TopRegistrars.com
"The =20 Error can be eliminated by using a program called Textpad (http://www.textpad.com) If you copy an e-mail (before it is sent) into this program, and convert the entire e-mail to DOS (with the click of a button), and then copy that converted e-mail into your listserv -- it should copy in beautifully, no =20 problems on any e-mail service." -- Maria Gracia - Get Organized Now! www.getorganizednow.com
Editor: Good idea, Maria, HTML e-mail deliberately encodes =20 for spaces and then is decoded by the e-mail client of the recipient. But for ASCII newsletters using Majordomo, your suggestion might solve some problems.
Echo Mailers
"To test out any mail stuff and what it looks like, the Internet gurus did invent the so called 'Echo mailers' a long time ago. An Echo Mailer is a robot software which simply bounces back what was send to it. You can give it a try:
mailto:echo@tu-berlin.de or
mailto:echo@tu-chemnitz.de
This also is a good check before sending out a newsletter. Send it to an echo mailer and you will see if everything is fine, what headers get added to your mail etc. To use a fictive address and let the mail bounce is not a good idea." -- Klaus Arnold, www.klaus-arnhold.de Hamburg, Germany
Editor: Good idea. It works better than my fictitious address approach. Thank you. Has anyone found an echo mailer address in the US?
