New Features & Updates Archives

MailBuild Ruby Gem updated

Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 5, 2008 9:13 AM

Cameron Yule's Ruby Gem wrapper for the MailBuild API, which we mentioned in a recent post has just been updated. Cameron announced Version 1.1 on his blog which adds support for multiple subscriber lists.

Visit the MailBuild API documentation for links to all the API details.

0 comments so far

Beautiful new templates now available

Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 14, 2008 5:01 PM

The biggest challenge to great email design is inconsistency between email clients when they render HTML and CSS. To help save you a huge amount of time, hassle and possibly hair pulling, our support team guru Travis has coded up a huge selection of brand new MailBuild templates.

These templates are fully tested in all the major email clients from Outlook 2007, our old friend, to Thunderbird and Lotus Notes. While they won't appear exactly the same in all cases, you will see that they are very close in most cases, and will always look great.

In order to achieve this, we've had to make some compromises, and the code is a little more complex and less easily editable than before. However, you should still be able to grab these templates and make something awesome for your clients or even your own email campaigns.

Each template contains a version with all the relevant MailBuild tags built right in, including the new multiple repeater tags. You also get a copy of the original Photoshop file, so you can go in and change some of the graphical elements.

We think you'll find these new templates really useful, and visually appealing, so visit the templates page and have a look around!

6 comments so far

A Joomla plugin for MailBuild

Posted by Travis Bell on August 8, 2008 1:19 PM

It looks like Van Eldijk Studio's been busy making a slew of useful extensions for Joomla and low and behold, one of them is for MailBuild!

The extension makes it easy for anyone to add a subscribe form to your existing site without playing around with HTML. Add your MailBuild account details and you're good to go!

Added on July 30, this extension is still pretty new but we'd love to hear from some Joomla users who have tried it out.

You can read all about the extension and download it from here.

In case you haven't been keeping track this marks the third community created plugin for MailBuild (Drupal, Ruby Gem and Joomla) which is simply fantastic! Keep up the great work guys.

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A Ruby Gem wrapper for the MailBuild API

Posted by Mathew Patterson on July 28, 2008 9:59 AM

Super smart MailBuild user and Glasgow based developer, Cameron Yule has released the first version of his new MailBuild API interface for Ruby on Rails.

Cameron has all the details over on his site, and even includes an example Rails application that demonstrates the use of the new gem.

Great work Cameron! We always love to see people who are willing to share their work with other MailBuild users in this way, so if you've done something soimilar yourself, make sure you let us know.

Cameron's gem has been added to our MailBuild API documentation where it joins existing PHP and Flash API examples.

We've got some big plans for future improvements to the MailBuild API, but we're always interested in hearing what you think is important or could be useful too, so leave us a comment below.

2 comments so far

Editor update: Feedback and Fixes

Posted by David Greiner on July 22, 2008 5:45 PM

It's been 24 hours since we launched the new editor and I just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone who has been sending in so many kind words about the upgrade. It's awesome you're finding it a big improvement, and especially cool that your clients are digging it too.

A number of you guys have also notice some irregular behavior with some templates, and we've been hard at work fixing these issues. We just pushed another update to the editor live that included fixes for the following issues:

• Floating titles that include links can now be updated once added.
• Drag and drop sorting is now working across the board. Some templates has some pretty serious nested table action but we've worked through it so drag and drop away.
• When editing an existing floating image, you can now delete it altogether, as well as replace it.

On an unrelated note, a number of customers have been asking if they can nest a repeater within a repeater. I'm afraid that's not supported right now, and unless there is serious demand it's not going to happen in the short-term.

Thanks again for all the great feedback. Of course, If you spot any other issues moving forward, please get in touch. We want this transition to be as smooth as possible for both you and your clients.

4 comments so far

The new MailBuild editor is alive and kicking

Posted by David Greiner on July 21, 2008 2:51 PM

I'm very pleased to announce that the new MailBuild editor has just been pushed live and is now available to all of your clients. We covered the list of new features here last week, but here's a quick summary if you missed it:

1. Multiple repeater support - Include as many repeaters in your templates as you'd like.
2. Inline CSS - We automatically move all your CSS inline when sending the campaign for the best results in all email clients.
3. Drag and drop - Move repeater items quickly and easily.
4. Live preview - See precisely how your content looks as you type.
5. Bigger, resizable WYSIWYG editor - Great for clients adding big chunks of content to their campaigns.
6. Huge performance increase - Rebuilt from the ground up, feels like you're editing a local document.

The only change to the template tagging structure is the addition of a new toc='true' attribute in the repeater tag, which I'll discuss in more detail below. We've also put together a sample template that includes multiple repeaters and uses this new attribute.

 Download the sample template (including Photoshop files - 2.5mb .zip)

Now that the new editor is out in the wild, we'll also be releasing a whole bunch of new sample templates that take advantage of the more flexible editing environment. Look out for an announcement here soon.

Answers to common questions

Will my old templates break?

Not a chance, the editor will continue to work for all your older templates. In fact, there have been no changes to the current templates tags, you can just include as many repeaters as you like, instead of the previous limit of one.

What happens to the table of contents when there are multiple repeaters?

As you know, we automatically populate your table of contents tag as your client adds items to their template. Now that we support multiple repeaters, you can tell us which repeater should populate the table of contents with the toc='true' attribute in your <repeater> tag. Here's how it looks for a repeater that includes a title, description and image...

<repeater toc='true'>
  <$title$>
  <$description$>
  <img src="<$imagesrc link='true'$>" width="200">
</repeater>

If you have the table of contents tags along with multiple repeaters and no toc='true' attribute is present, we'll use the first repeater found in your code.

Can I have a repeater that is just images and no text?

You sure can. Previously a repeater needed to include a title, but you can now have image-only repeaters. This means, for example, you could include a photo gallery in your template, among other things.

We do have more plans for the editor moving forward, such as making it easier for your clients to add personalization tags and giving more sophisticated clients a more advanced editor. In the mean time, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the new editor and any suggestions on how we could make it even better.

5 comments so far

Coming next week: All new MailBuild editor

Posted by David Greiner on July 14, 2008 4:55 PM

The past few weeks we've been hard at work putting the final touches on an all new version of the MailBuild editor. It's launching this time next Monday (July 21st), but we wanted to give you a heads up on the new features we'll be including.

Here's a quick screencast showing some of the new features in action. You can also check out a higher quality version here.

Multiple repeater support

Of all the feature requests we've received for the editor, this has been the most popular by far. For many of you, a single repeater just didn't cut it. We've completely re-built the editor, allowing you to include as many repeating items in your template as you need.

Inline CSS

This is a big one. We now automatically move all of your template CSS inline for your clients when sending the email. This means a much more consistent rendering across all email clients, especially those with poor CSS support like Gmail and Outlook 2007.

You won't need to make any updates to your templates either, this will work automatically for all of your clients current template designs.

Drag and drop

Re-ordering the items in your newsletter is now as easy as picking it up and dropping it where you'd like. Even if you've coded your template using nested tables, you can still drag and drop any repeating items to change their order. No more moving items up and down click by click.

Live preview

Now your clients can see exactly how their content will look in the email as they type it. No more switching back and forth between editing and previewing just to see how your content will look. After using the new editor myself, I can personally vouch for how much of a time saver this is.

Bigger, resizable WYSIWYG editor

If your clients are adding lots of content to their emails, the limited size of the current editor made it hard to see a lot of what they were writing at once. The new editor maximizes use of the available screen real estate and can be resized to any height your client prefers.

Huge performance increase

The entire editor has been rebuilt from scratch and is now much faster than the original. This speed increase combined with the live preview feature make it feel just like working on a local document.

We'll be rolling out the new editor next Monday, so you might want to let your clients know in advance that these improvements are coming. The editor will still work in more or less the same manner, so your clients shouldn't have a problem picking up where the old editor left off.

We hope you like the changes, this is the first in a series of big updates we'll be making to MailBuild over the next few months. Look out for an update to the blog the moment the new editor goes live next week.

22 comments so far

New feature: HTML default descriptions

Posted by Mathew Patterson on April 14, 2008 4:59 PM

When you are creating MailBuild templates, you can provide default text that will show up in the editable areas, so your client can choose to change it, or leave the default.

For example, your template might have a section called "Joanne's Update" every month, but twice a year it is "Bill's Update". You would set the default to "Joanne's Update" and let your client edit it when needed.

Today we have made default descriptions a little bit smarter, by extending them to allow HTML tags inside your default text. So now you can include links in your default text, for example:

<$description default='<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/contact">Contacts: </a><br />Ph 09 481 1111<br />Click Reply to email us'$>

The URL might change for a different store, and your client can just edit the text without you needing to edit the template. Any time you have a section that is normally the same but should be editable, you can embed the HTML into the default section.

Thanks to all the customers who have suggested this!

4 comments so far

Update: WYSIWYG editor faster, more reliable and even works in Safari

Posted by David Greiner on April 4, 2008 11:52 AM

Today we put the finishing touches on a new WYSIWYG editor that your clients use when adding their content to your templates. Here are some of the highlights...

Now works in Safari

If you or your clients are running Safari version 3 or later, you'll now be able to use the WYSIWYG editor instead of the default textarea. You could always use Firefox or Camino on the Mac to access the editor, but if Safari's your browser of choice (it's mine), there's no need to switch. Here's a screenshot of it in action in Safari.

No more popup blocker issues

Because we force all pasting to plain text (to make sure your clients don't import a big chunk of Ugly Word formatting), we used to popup a dialog window when pasting. Turns out some browsers popup blockers would stop this window from opening, meaning paste just wouldn't work.

We now open the paste dialog (and the insert link dialog) in an overlay div on the same page, so it works for everyone (and is also faster to appear).

Faster and more reliable in all browsers

This update brings some nice stability improvements and ensures that no matter what client or OS your client is using, the editor should work consistently and reliably. We hope you like it.

7 comments so far

MailBuild module for Drupal now available

Posted by David Greiner on March 13, 2008 1:51 PM

If you're a fan of the super popular Drupal content management system, you're going to love this. Awesome MailBuild customers Spoon Media have just put together a Drupal module for MailBuild that makes it easy to integrate a MailBuild subscription form on a Drupal managed site.

Setting it up is as easy as installing the module and then adding your API key and list ID. Instructions on how to get these details from your MailBuild account can be found here.

A big thanks again to Alex Cochrane and the team at Spoon Media for putting this module together.

2 comments so far

Short downtime this Monday (Sydney time)

Posted by Mathew Patterson on February 8, 2008 3:31 PM

MailBuild will be unavailable for logging in and sending campaigns from 9am to 9:30am, Sydney time, on Monday February 11th. See this in your local time

Next Monday we'll be taking MailBuild offline for a half hour so we can beef up our storage capacity and redundancy for all your email campaigns. So we have plenty more room to grow in the future, we're adding in new storage hardware that will also give us more flexibility.

What will be affected?
You (and your clients) will not be able to login to your MailBuild account during that period (you will see a maintenance message instead). Campaigns will not be sent, but will go out immediately after the application is brought back up.

Emails which have already been sent will continue to be viewable by all your recipients, and we will still be tracking all the opens, clicks and unsubscribes so your reports will be accurate.

We do not foresee any difficulties with this procedure, and it should have minimal impact on you all, but do let your clients know if they are likely to be affected. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Update: This maintenance is now complete.

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Using your own domain for your MailBuild account

Posted by Mathew Patterson on December 28, 2007 4:25 PM

If you are reselling MailBuild as part of your business or if you have thought about doing it, your job just got a bit easier.

Just before Christmas we released a MailBuild update to let you setup custom domain names for your MailBuild account. What does that mean? In the past, your clients would login at a URL like xyzdesign.<genericdomain>.com. Now, you can map email.xyzdesign.com (or anything else) to your MailBuild account, so your clients never need appear to leave your site at all.

How to setup a custom domain name with MailBuild

All you'll need is a domain name you want to use, and access to the DNS records to add a CNAME record for that domain.

1. Select the Customize tab

It's really very easy! Jump into your MailBuild account (as the administrator) and click through to the 'Customize' tab. At the bottom of the page you will spot a new section, 'Custom Domain Name'.

2. Enter your new domain name

Type in the full domain name your clients will login at. This might be a subdomain on your company site, or it could be a totally separate domain, it's up to you.

3. Setup your CNAME record

Depending on the DNS host you use, you may be able to add this record yourself, or you may need your host to add it for you. If you aren't sure, get in touch with your host. Keep in mind that it is possible your web host and your DNS host are different companies. Grab the details of the CNAME record you need to add, and enter it or send it to your DNS host.

4. Verify the DNS record

DNS record changes can take a while to propagate through, so give yourself some time and then click the 'Verify my custom domain' button. MailBuild will go off and check that the record is visible and correct, and then you are done!

Now you and your clients can login via the domain name you entered. Your previous *.<genericdomain>.com subdomain will keep working, but you will want to let your clients know the new login address.

Thanks to everyone who has requested this feature, we hope you enjoy it!

26 comments so far

Slew of small updates go live

Posted by David Greiner on December 18, 2007 2:00 PM

In our continued effort to make MailBuild as reliable and smooth an experience as possible, we've just pushed more than 20 new updates and fixes live. None of them are significant new features or anything that really stands out, but collectively they show how we're continually working on improving the app based on all the great feedback and suggestions you all keep sending our way.

Here are a few of the highlights...

Prevent email harvesters from grabbing your email address

If any of your customers have a problem logging in to their accounts, we provide your contact details so they can get in touch with you directly via email. Nasty email address harvesters could then find this page and add your address to their own spam databases. We're now encoding that email address to keep your email address safe.

Long links are now easier to read in your reports

If you included very long links in your newsletter, our reports made it difficult to see the full URL your subscribers might have clicked because we'd only include the first 50 or so characters. Now we show the first 25 and last 25 characters so you can be sure exactly what links in your email are popular.

Better bounce reporting for plain text campaigns

We've expanded our bounce reporting for plain text emails to include the reason why that email address might have hard or soft bounced, making it easier for you and your clients to diagnose exactly what happened.

Making it easier for your Hotmail recipients to unsubscribe

As you know, if a client's subscriber no longer wants to hear from them they have 2 options - mark it as spam or try and find the unsubscribe link. By including a special line in the header of every email we deliver for your clients, all of their Hotmail recipients will now see an "Unsubscribe" option at the top of the email that they can click to remove themselves from your list. Here's an example of thow this will look.

This new feature goes a long way towards reducing false positive spam complaints by encouraging your client's recipients that are no longer interested to take the unsubscribe option. The unsubscribe option will be visible to every subscriber that's marked your client as a safe sender (or added them to their contacts). If your client has ever received spam complaints from their Hotmail recipients, you'll know just how important this is.

2 comments so far

Custom domain names almost here

Posted by Mathew Patterson on December 7, 2007 3:37 PM

Not long ago we mentioned our upcoming custom domain name feature, to let you use your own domain name with your MailBuild account.

We actually finished this feature a little while ago and nearly released it, but it would have required you all to edit your templates to make it work. So instead of putting that work on you, we decided to hold off until we could sort all that out on your behalf.

So start thinking about what domain name you might want to use for your account - and look out in the next couple of weeks for the launch.

Update: Just in time for the holidays we've pushed this feature live and plan on making an official announcement soon. You can set up your custom domain under the Customize tab in your account.

Once you make the change and your domain is verified, we'll automatically log you in at your new address and change all your templates/drafts to use your domain for all image references and link tracking, making your account truly private label. Enjoy, thanks for your patience and happy holidays!

11 comments so far

New pricing is now active in all accounts

Posted by David Greiner on November 28, 2007 3:24 PM

The pricing reductions for Euro, Canadian and Australian dollars I mentioned last week are now active in your account.

Unfortunately because of the fees we incur to process these foreign currencies, we couldn't get an exact match with current exchange rates. This was especially frustrating for Canadian dollars considering it's currently worth slightly more than the US dollar. Having said that, $5 and 1.1 cents is a whole lot better than $7 and 1.5 cents.

If you've been marking any of your clients up in these currencies, all this means is that your profit margin just got a little wider.

1 comments so far

Price reductions for foreign currencies

Posted by David Greiner on November 21, 2007 6:56 PM

Boy how things can change in 6 months! When we originally set the foreign currency prices for MailBuild, we tried to take into account a decent amount of historical data for each currency. We wanted to avoid the need to make lots of small price changes, which would be a hassle for you to constantly communicate back to your clients. We also wanted to avoid having to raise our prices, which no one likes either.

New foreign currency prices

As of next Wednesday (that's the 28th of November), we'll be lowering our prices for a number of currencies to bring them more in line with current exchange rates and keep our pricing fair. This includes a significant reduction in our Canadian dollar pricing and a nice drop for Euro and Australian dollars. Our Great Britain pound and US dollar prices will continue to remain the same.

You might have noticed that these figures are not exactly on par with the current exchange rates. Unfortunately we can't match them to the cent because of conversion fees we pay on foreign currencies. We tried hard on this one, but I'm afraid we just couldn't make it work. Of course, if the market changes so dramatically again in the next 6 months there may be another tweak in either direction.

When these price reductions go into effect next week, you won't have to actually do anything if you're marking your clients up, you'll just start earning more profit for every email they send. For those not marking their clients up, your client will see a nice saving for the next campaign they send.

On a side note, we'll try and continue giving notice of any significant changes like this in advance. We realize that many of you need to communicate these changes back to your clients, and it's never a good look if the client sees it before you do. We're also considering adding a simple alert mechanism to the dashboard of all admin account holders to keep them in the loop.

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Suppression lists are here

Posted by David Greiner on November 6, 2007 7:07 PM

Our brand new suppression list feature we mentioned a little while back was rolled out over the last few days. All went very smoothly and they are now available to all your clients under their Manage Subscribers tab. You'll notice that each suppression list is populated with all the unsubscribes from any previous lists in that client's account. This ensures that moving forward anyone who previously unsubscribed cannot be added to any new subscriber lists.

By default, each suppression list will store anyone who ever unsubscribes, hard bounces, marks your client's emails as spam or soft bounces over multiple campaigns. To ensure these individuals are never emailed again, any email addresses in your suppression list cannot be added to any of your client's subscriber lists.

Accessing the suppression list

Every client now has their own suppression list, which they can access at any time from the subscriber list index page, pictured below:

Once they access their suppression list, they can easily add and remove addresses they'd like to be included. Here's the main screen for a suppression list:

Controlling which of your client's lists use the suppression list

While all of your client's lists add any unsubscribes to the suppression list by default, you can turn this on or off on a list-by-list basis. If you'd like to ensure a particular subscriber list does not scrub any new subscribers against the suppression list or update it with any unsubscribes, head into the "Unsubscribe Options" for that list:

You'll now notice a setting at the top of "Unsubscribe Options" that lets you set how any unsubscribes are handled. If your client would like to ensure this list never uses the suppression list, they can select "Only unsubscribe from this list". If they'd like any unsubscribes to be added to the suppression list, which we recommend, they can select "Unsubscribe them from all this client's lists".

Your clients can change this setting at any time. If they decide to change their subscriber list so that it hooks into the suppression list, they'll be given the option to make updates to both lists.

These options allow your clients to instantly add anyone who previously unsubscribed from that list to the suppression list. They'll also have the option to scrub all of their active subscribers in that list against the suppression list.

4 comments so far

About as white as "white label" gets - use your own domain name

Posted by David Greiner on November 5, 2007 7:12 PM

We go to great lengths to make it as easy as possible to resell MailBuild as your own software to your clients (check out our case studies if you're not doing this already). You can customize the interface, add your logo and even let your clients login from your own site. We never mention MailBuild in your account or any of their emails that we deliver.

But... there was always one link in the chain you couldn't change. The domain name your clients access their account at once logged in. Sure, we let you customize our own generic domain name, but in some cases you guys want full ownership of every part of the experience. What if they searched the web for that domain or saw it being used for another newsletter they subscribe to. We never want to blow your cover, and ultimately this means never mentioning anything that could lead your clients back to our web site.

After loads of requests from customers, we've recently made the decision to support full domain name customization of your MailBuild account. Let's say you're a design company called Shift Design. This new feature lets your clients access their account at email.shiftdesign.com, or even www.shiftmail.com - it's completely up to you. Your domain is the only one mentioned in your client's accounts.

We're working hard on this new feature now, and hope to have it live some time this month. Keep an eye on the blog for the announcement and thanks again to everyone who requested it.

19 comments so far

Coming soon: MailBuild suppression lists

Posted by Mathew Patterson on October 25, 2007 3:39 PM

Time for a sneak peek at a new feature coming soon to your MailBuild account. If your clients are importing files fairly often, but have no way of just importing the new ones and not existing addresses, you may have run into this problem:

What about all the people who unsubscribed before? Will they be reimported and start getting email again? MailBuild has always been smart enough to remember unsubscribed people as long as you import into the same list each time, but not every client does that.

Suppression lists are the answer - it's like a special list for each client, that remembers all the people who have unsubscribed, been manually removed, or bounced out of any list that client has. Then when your client imports a new file, MailBuild checks all the addresses to see if they are in the suppression list, and if so, discards them from the import.

There's a message to tell you what happened, and you can remove people from the suppression list if you have their permission to email them again. We'll be releasing suppression lists in your account within the next few weeks - watch the blog for an announcement.

1 comments so far

Loads of behind the scenes updates

Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 28, 2007 4:33 PM

The MailBuild team has been busy recently working on a bunch of small improvements and fixes; some in response to your feedback and some from our internal issue tracking. Here's a quick overview of a few updates now live.

Prevent double charging— A few customers had reported instances of two charges for the same campaign. We've always refunded those of course, but we've redesigned the way payment works to prevent that from happening again.

Background color attributes picked up— If you use bgcolor attributes in your template body tag, the color will now correctly show up in the editing page.

Additional tracking URLs and IP addresses — In our continued efforts to ensure we can offer you and your clients the best deliverability possible, we recently added a number of new tracking URL's to our arsenal. This ensures that in the rare case one of our URL's is erroneously blacklisted, we can immediately take it out of rotation until we resolve the issue on your behalf.

Spaces in links converted correctly— We've made some changes so that links in your content that contain spaces work correctly when converted for link tracking.

Thanks to everyone who has contacted us about these issues, we appreciate it. If you run across any bugs while using MailBuild, please do get in touch, we're always working on improving the experience for you and your clients.

0 comments so far

Editing page problems - we've rolled back our changes

Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 23, 2007 6:04 PM

A few days ago we posted about a change we had made to the MailBuild editing page, to add a DOCTYPE. Our intentions were good (and in response to some customer requests), but clearly our testing was not extensive enough.

We've heard from quite a few people since then that have seen their templates behaving oddly in some browsers, with double scroll bars and broken layouts. None of this affected the rendering of the actual campaigns when sent, but it was very annoying and confusing.

So today we have decided to roll back to the previous stable state, which should correct all of those problems. If you had made changes to your templates to fix rendering that had changed, everything should still work for you, although we apologise for wasting your time.

We promise we won't make any changes like this again without giving you all adequate warning, and we've also rejigged our testing processes so we can pick these things up before release.

Thanks to everyone who has been in touch to let us know about these problems, and please accept our apologies for the trouble. If you have any problems, questions or feedback, please let us know by leaving a comment or emailing support.

1 comments so far

Templates suddenly appearing centred in IE7?

Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 16, 2007 2:59 PM

Recently we made small change to the MailBuild content editing page, to properly define the DOCTYPE as:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

This was to resolve an issue where your templates would be rendered in quirks mode incorrectly during editing. Adding the DOCTYPE has fixed that, but it means that some of your templates now may render slightly differently than before when viewed in the editing page.

This will not affect the final email at all, only the editing view, but it can still be an annoyance. In particular, you may notice that table cells which used to be left aligned become centered if your table itself is center aligned.

In that case, you just need to put align='left' on your table cells and it will be fixed up. Another excellent reminder of the browser wars, and the days of 4 different ways of coding the same page!

0 comments so far

Forward to a Friend report changes

Posted by Mathew Patterson on July 23, 2007 4:45 PM

One of our key concerns at MailBuild has always been ensuring that every subscriber has given their permission to be emailed. Given those standards, we recently decided that we needed to make a small change to the 'forward to a friend' feature.

Until now, we reported on both the people who forwarded, and the addresses they forwarded your campaigns to. Although we certainly didn't add these friends to a list or let you export them, we did expose their details to you. We also were not making it clear on the Forward to a Friend page that your friend's details were actually being captured.

Although this has never caused any issues or complaints so far, it's clearly not best practice, so we have now removed the display of people receiving forwarded emails. Instead, you'll now see which subscribers forwarded your email and how many people they forwarded it to. This change has also been applied to any previous campaigns you've sent.

We know how interesting (and fun!) it can be to see who is getting your campaigns forwarded to them, but individual's details were being exposed without their permission to the campaign sender.

We need to put the privacy of these people above anything else. The best way to take full advantage of the 'forward to a friend' feature may be to add a prominent link in each email encouraging new subscribers to sign up, then link right to the subscribe form on your site.

That way, you will know they actually are interested, and you have their full permission to send them email in the future.

3 comments so far

Embedding tags within tags

Posted by David Greiner on July 20, 2007 5:49 PM

When we announced our new default= and link="true" template tags in May, we got some awesome feedback. One great suggestion came from MailBuild customer Lara Compton, who wanted tags to work within tags. Here's what she asked for...

Love the new default value feature... One more thing that we would like to be able to do is the following:

<$title default="Welcome to the <$currentmonthname$> issue of Newsletter"$>

We were listening, and today I'm happy to announce that we now support the use of tags within the default= tag for all MailBuild templates. Thanks for the suggestion Lara, keep them coming.

3 comments so far

Quick template gallery update

Posted by David Greiner on July 12, 2007 1:16 PM

After some great feedback from a few customers, we've made some further tweaks to the 30 pack of email templates we released last week. These changes improve the results in Outlook 2007 even further, while still maintaining a consistent look in all the other email environments.

Along the way we learnt about a number of key quirks in the Outlook 2007 (um, Word) rendering engine, which we plan on posting about in the next few days. We recommend downloading the latest updates to make sure all your recipients using Outlook 2007 get the benefits of these tweaks.

This update also includes the addition of a screenshot for each template. If you're not making any significant layout or color changes to the design, including the screenshot when you add it to your clients account makes it much easier to preview and select a template when creating a new email campaign.

0 comments so far

Your billing history just got smarter

Posted by David Greiner on July 10, 2007 9:48 AM

When we introduced the new automated billing system a few months back, plenty of you guys made the switch from paying on behalf of your clients, to letting them pay us directly. To accommodate this, we needed to split your billing history into 2 parts - those clients you pay on behalf of, and those clients that pay themselves.

Fast forward to today, and the old billing data for those clients you used to pay for is largely irrelevant. What you really want to know is how much mark-up you've made so far this month. Anything else just gets in the way.

From now on, if you've switched all your clients over to paying for themselves (either at our base rates or your own rates) and you haven't paid for a client in the last month, we'll automatically move that billing history into an archived page, and focus on the important stuff only. You can get to this archive at any time by clicking the "Archive of past transactions" option.

0 comments so far

The new template gallery

Posted by David Greiner on July 5, 2007 12:25 PM

A few minutes ago we launched a new and fully loaded template gallery with more than 30 free, great looking MailBuild templates. We've done all the hard work for you, and every template has been tested in all the major email environments like Outlook 2007, Hotmail, Yahoo, Lotus Notes and so many more.

The templates range from simple, single column emails through to more complex 2 column newsletters with different types of content. Each has been built with the MailBuild template tags already added. We've also been careful to keep the use of images to a minimum, so the templates look great even when images have been disabled. Changing the color scheme to suit your client's brand is as simple as making a few simple tweaks to the code.

As well as being available on the site, you'll also be able to preview and download all of these templates from the template gallery in your account from later today. This is the first in a series of new templates we're putting together to cover every type of email concept you'll need as a base for each client. If you're looking for some further inspiration, don't forget about our customer template gallery.

3 comments so far

Australian dollar support is now live

Posted by David Greiner on July 2, 2007 10:54 AM

It took a little longer than we hoped but we've officially integrated Australian dollar support into MailBuild, making it easy for all our Aussie customers to bill their clients in the local currency. Keeping the pricing local goes a long way when your private labelling MailBuild, so we're wrapped to have this available.

The Australian dollar base pricing will be a $7 delivery fee and then 1.5 cents/recipient. As usual, you can mark up either of these prices on a per client basis to suit. Also, if you're an Australia based company with local and international clients, you can set the payment currency per client, and charge each customer the currency they feel comfortable paying in.

While we only launched support for non-US currencies on the 21st June, plenty of you guys have already moved your clients across and made local currency profits for that month. Thanks again to everyone for the feedback and kind words we've been receiving so far.

5 comments so far

Segments have arrived, time to start targeting

Posted by David Greiner on June 26, 2007 12:06 PM

A few days back we snuck out the release of the brand new segments functionality in MailBuild. This new feature makes it easy for your clients to send much more targeted emails to their subscribers.

Segments work by building rules around the types of subscribers you'd like to target. These rules are based around the data you store on each subscriber, such as email address, interests, amount spent, etc and also campaign activity, such as opening a past campaign. For example, if you have the data, it's easy to create a segment of all your female customers in Chicago who clicked the link to your online store in the last newsletter you sent.

Your segments can be as simple or as complex as you like, and they're a breeze for you and your clients to build with our step-by-step wizard. Once you or your clients create a segment, it will be available in the Define Recipients screen when sending your next newsletter. Here's a quick overview of the process.

1. Head into your list and click "Manage Segments"

Click on the Manage Subscribers tab, then select the list you'd like to create a segment for. Next, click the Manage segments link under List Options.

2. Click to create a new segment

Click on the Create a new segment link on the right hand side.

3. Name the segment

Give the segment a recognizable name that describes the types of subscribers it will include.

4. Create your first rule

Create your first rule by selecting the type of rule you want to create and click the Create Rule button. If you have created custom fields for this list, or have previously sent a campaign to it, you will be able to create rules based on these elements too.

5. Add the rest of your rules for the segment

Based on the type of rule you create, you'll be presented with different options, such as greater than, equals, is provided and contains. If you've already sent a campaign to this list, you'll also have options based on past campaign behaviour, such as opening a recent newsletter or clicking a certain link.

6. Send targeted emails just to that segment

Once you save your segment, it will be available in Step 3 of the Create/Send process. Just like sending to a complete subscriber list, you can select the checkbox next to your segment, and send the campaign just to those subscribers that meet the criteria you set for that segment.

Enjoy! If you have any feedback or suggestions on how we can continue to improve the segments functionality, we'd love to hear it.

8 comments so far

Turning off link tracking and image downloading in your templates

Posted by David Greiner on June 22, 2007 2:19 PM

When you import your templates into MailBuild, we automatically download all your images and convert all your links so they can be tracked through your client's reports.

But, what if on the odd chance you didn't want us to do that? What if you wanted to pull an ad banner from an external server and that image rotated each month? In other situations, the link tracking might not be the best option, such as linking to an account login page. By converting the URL to our tracking domain it may make the recipient suspicious. By hard linking to an important or secure page, you can ensure a recipient doesn't think it's a phishing email.

We've just added a couple of simple attributes you can add to your code that let us know to leave certain bits alone. All you need to do is add either the mb_dontimportimage or mb_dontconvertlink attribute to your image or link tags. As a quick example, here's the image tag in action:

Turning off image importing

<img src="http://www.myserver.com/filename.jpg" width="20" height="20" alt="alt text here" mb_dontimportimage>

Turning off link tracking

<a href="http://www.myserver.com" mb_dontconvertlink>this is a link</a>

Although we don't do any conversion when we detect these values, we do remove the mb_dontimportimage and mb_dontconvertlink values when we actually send your client's campaign.

Please note that these tags only apply to your template code, and not the content your clients add. If a client adds their own image or links to the email content, these will be uploaded and tracked for them automatically.

0 comments so far

Multi-currency client billing is here

Posted by David Greiner on June 21, 2007 4:10 PM

When we launched the new US dollar billing system in February, the resounding feedback was "cool" closely followed by "where is my currency". We were listening and today I'm wrapped to announce the support for 3 new currencies, with a fourth on the way next week. As of today, you can now charge your clients in US dollars, Great Britain pounds, Euros and Canadian dollars. Ironically, Australian dollar support has been delayed and won't be live until next week.

To keep things as simple as possible and avoid lots of messy price conversions, we've set new base prices for each currency, which are as follows:

These are the basic minimum prices your clients will need to pay depending on the currency you set for them. We tried to keep everything as consistent as possible with the US dollar rates, and to avoid constant price tweaking went for figures based on a few years of fluctuations for each currency.

Just like US dollars, you can choose to mark any of these prices up, and we'll send you the difference you earn at the end of each month. To change the currency you're using for each client, head into their account, click the Client Settings tab and then edit their Billing settings.

Based on the feedback we've been getting so far, these 5 currencies should cover most of you guys. Of course, if the demand is there, we've built things so we can easily accommodate other currencies if need be. Australian dollar support shouldn't be more than a few days away, and we'll make an announcement here as soon as it's good to go. Finally, a big shout goes to Freshviewer Ken Nguyen, who was the brains behind this update from start to finish.

3 comments so far

Sneak peek: Segments and multi-currency billing

Posted by David Greiner on June 14, 2007 11:02 AM

The blog updates have been a little on the light side lately, but we haven't been sitting on our hands. Here are a few teaser screenshots highlighting some of the new features we'll be rolling out in the next week or two.

Multi-currency client billing

We can't wait to get this one out. As of next week you'll be able to bill your clients in Great Britain Pounds, Euro, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars and US dollars.

Subscriber segmentation

To complement the recent custom fields update, our new segments feature makes it easy to create groups within your client's lists for more targeted campaigns.

We're just putting the finishing touches on these two big updates, and will post an update the moment they're available in your accounts next week.

2 comments so far

Custom field support in the API

Posted by David Greiner on May 21, 2007 3:54 PM

When we announced custom fields support was live, we had some great requests on what should come next. One of the most requested features was the ability to add custom field data from the API.

I'm happy to announce that custom field support in the API is now live. Check out the full documentation for some sample code on how to get started with this new method.

Now that this one is out of the way, we're hard at work on the next big custom fields extension - segmentation. This functionality will make it easy for your clients to send much more targeted campaigns by creating "segments" of subscribers based on custom field data. We're hoping to have this feature out the door in the next few weeks. Thanks for your patience.

1 comments so far

New template tags: Easily insert links and set default values

Posted by David Greiner on May 14, 2007 12:56 PM

Hot on the heels of our custom fields release, I'm pleased to announce the launch of two highly requested updates to our template tagging system.

Add a link to a title or image with link="true"

By far the most requested template feature, the new link="true" attribute allows your clients to easily add their own links to any title or image via the editor. Here's the syntax...

<$title link="true"$>
<$imagesrc link="true"$>

The link attribute can be added to any title or imagesrc tag in your template, whether it's in a <repeater> or free standing. When this attribute is present, your clients will see a small icon next to their title or image tag which they can click and add their own URL.

We've put together a quick video walkthrough of this new tag in action so you can quickly see how easy it is for your clients to add links to any content in their email.

Set default values for any title or description with default=""

The new default="" attribute allows you to easily set default values for any title or description tag in your template. This makes it easy to add little guidelines to any template telling your client which content goes where. Here's the syntax...

<$title default="This month's listings"$>
<$description default="Add the monthly listings here, but try to keep the description to a few lines."$>

On top of helping your clients out, you can use it to set the default values for those tags that aren't updated very often. This might be the title of the newsletter or the contact details of the company.

For example, we noticed some of you guys creating multiple versions of the same template with the only difference being the title of the newsletter, such as "Breaking News" or "Monthly Report". You could use the default="" attribute to set the most commonly used title, but still give your client the flexibility to change it depending on the type of email they're sending.

We've also updated our official template documentation to include samples and more information about the two newest tags in the MailBuild family.

13 comments so far

New feature: Custom fields are here

Posted by David Greiner on May 9, 2007 6:22 PM

When developing software like MailBuild, there aren't many things better than rolling a new feature out the door. Especially if it's the most requested feature you've had since launching. Today I'm very happy to announce that custom fields are now available in all MailBuild accounts. Do your clients want to store more about their subscribers like country, interests or favourite lipstick? We've got you covered.

Here's a quick screenshot of the interface you and your clients can use to manage custom fields for each list.

If you've used MailBuild's older brother Campaign Monitor before, you'll already be pretty familiar with the custom fields interface. We've tried to make it as easy as possible to manage your custom field data, as well as get this data into your account. We've also updated the importing tool so you to easily match up the columns in your file with the corresponding custom fields in your account.

We've also updated the "Create a Subscribe Form" page making it easy to capture custom field data on your client's web sites. Our simple form builder lets you select the fields to include and exactly how you'd like to capture them.

Just like Campaign Monitor, you can have up to 10 custom fields for each list on top of name and email address.

So, what's next?

You tell us. We've got plenty of ideas on how we can extend and improve the custom field functionality throughout the app. Some of our ideas are:

• Allow you to segment subscribers based on custom field data so you and your clients can send more targeted campaigns.
• Make the custom field data available from your reports (such as opens over time and recipient activity).
• Make it easy for your clients to personalize their email content by easily inserting custom field values via the campaign editor.

So, which of these features (if any) are important to you, and in what order?

17 comments so far

New feature: Disable subscriber importing for a client

Posted by David Greiner on April 19, 2007 8:45 AM

When we announced the new client approval system yesterday, we also hinted at another new feature. As well as seeing the current approved sending limit for each client in Client Settings, you can now also disable the ability for a client to import any new subscribers into their lists. Here's a quick screenshot.

This has actually been a heavily requested feature, as many of you would prefer to handle the importing side of things for your client instead of leaving that responsibility with them. When subscriber importing has been disabled, your client will still have the ability to add subscribers one at a time, however they won't be able to import new subscribers from a file or import multiple subscribers at a time through our text-area feature.

Here's a quick screenshot showing the Manage Subscriber List screen with and without importing permissions.

Subscriber Importing Enabled

Subscriber Importing Disabled

While this functionality is disabled for your clients, the subscriber importing feature will always be available to you via the administrator login.

2 comments so far

New feature: Edit the auto-generated plain text version

Posted by David Greiner on April 18, 2007 8:03 AM

When your client sends a template based email, we've always generated a plain text alternative behind the scenes and included it with the final campaign. This plain text version basically included a link to the web based version, an unsubscrbe link and a thank you message. While this meant those receiving your email in a text-based email client or some mobile devices can still access your email content, it was never a perfect solution.

Today we've launched a cool new feature that automatically creates a nicely formatted plain text version of your client's newsletter and even gives them the ability to tweak the text content before final delivery.

Below is a screenshot of a quick email I whipped together using one of our standard templates, and below that it is the auto-generated text alternative.

The HTML version

The auto-generated plain text version

We've based the auto-generated text version on best practice and the formatting used by a number of key customers. All text is wrapped at 55 characters, links are placed in square brackets and we're using decorate characters for spacing and emphasis.

=================================================================
MAY NEWSLETTER
=================================================================

This email is best viewed in your web browser. Click the link
below to see it:
[webversion]

In this issue:
=================================================================
- New this month
- Another big announcement


New this month
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vivamus
id dolor quis urna ultricies viverra. Curabitur
[http://www.mailbuild.com] pellentesque viverra felis.
Suspendisse ultrices pede et massa interdum malesuada.

Aliquam ac dui hendrerit neque semper lobortis. Praesent in
magna.


Another big announcement
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vivamus
id dolor quis urna ultricies viverra. Curabitur
[http://www.mailbuild.com] pellentesque viverra felis.
Suspendisse ultrices pede et massa interdum malesuada.

Nam vitae risus ut pede convallis cursus. Lorem ipsum dolor sit
amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam sit amet nisl. Donec
vehicula. Curabitur id leo sit amet eros lobortis egestas.


-----------------------------------------------------------------

Not much to report here sorry!

-----------------------------------------------------------------


We sent this email to [email].

If you no longer wish to hear from us, click the link the below
to instantly unsubscribe:
[unsubscribe]

Staying out of your client's way

Of course, we realize that many of your clients are focused on the pretty stuff and don't really care about the text version. Because of this, we made sure this functionality wasn't a direct part of the create/send workflow they'd have to go through for every campaign, but is instead accessible from the Campaign Snapshot, like the screenshot below.

This ensures those clients who will be confused or don't care about the plain text alternative can blissfully create a nice looking email without ever knowing an elegant text alternative was being created. On the flipside, those savvier customers can jump in and tweak their text version to their hearts content.

10 comments so far

Brand new approval system to keep your clients on track

Posted by David Greiner on April 17, 2007 2:39 PM

We go to great lengths at MailBuild to ensure we can offer you and your clients a reliable service with great deliverability. An incredibly important part of this effort is ensuring MailBuild is never abused by spammers, and also to ensure the "good guys" are behaving themselves and sticking to best practice.

To ensure we stay on top of this effort, we've just launched a new approval process that all your clients need to go through when they start sending to more than a few thousand subscribers at once. This is a tiered approval process, but they'll only ever need approval again if they import a significantly larger list. This new process won't affect any of your clients immediately, and will only come into play if/when they import a much larger chunk of subscribers into their account.

How the system works

As soon as your client imports a large list that takes them past a few thousand subscribers, they'll be required to answer a simple question about the source of the list, which will be sent to our approvals team. To ensure we minimize any inconvenience to your clients, this approval process takes place when they import a large number of subscribers and not when they are actually trying to send to that list. This step will look similar to the screenshot below:

As soon as your client completes this form it is sent to our approval team who will review the list, your clients explanation, their sending history, etc and aim to get the import approved within 12 hours. If our approvals team has any further questions about the list, they will contact you, not your client.

Approval processes are unfortunately a necessary evil, but we go to every length we can to ensure your account remains 100% private label. At any time you can see what subscriber limit your client is approved to, so you can always pre-warn them about an upcoming approval if you know they'll be exceeding it. You can access these details from the Client Settings tab for each client, under Permissions. Here's a screenshot of how this looks...

What happens when my client's import is approved?

As soon as our approvals team gives your client's list the green light, we'll send them a non-branded email from you confirming the list is good to go. We'll also CC you on this to keep you in the loop.

At no time will your client be directly contacted by a member of the MailBuild team, so if we do have any questions about any aspect of the list, we'll go through you.

What happens when my client's import IS NOT approved?

If for some reason our approvals team feels your client's list doesn't comply with our permission policy, we will get in touch with you to discuss this further. This may involve you following this up with your client and ensuring any subscribers who don't comply are removed from the import.

On the rare occasion that the entire list doesn't comply (for example, it's a purchased list or has been scraped from the web), then we won't approve the import and none of the subscribers will be available in your client's account. At any rate, we'll be in touch with you before taking any significant action with your client's list.

Why we need to do this

Here are two really good reasons:

• It takes the pressure off you

  As per our anti-spam policy, all it takes for your entire account to be closed is just one misbehaving client. This isn't something we've had to enforce all that often, but it has happened and is most unfortunate. By ensuring all your clients have the correct permission, we can significantly reduce the pressure on you to keep all your clients in line.

  We know you're busy and can't keep an eye on all your clients all the time. No matter how well you explain the concept of permission and even make your client sign the dotted line, there's always a chance they'll import and send to subscribers they don't have permission to contact.

• It ensures your client's emails get delivered

  Minimal spam complaints and low bounce rates help ensure we can offer all our customers good deliverability and goes a long way to ensuring our whitelisting status at many ISP's and our general sending reputation stays nice and clean.

Finally, this approval process will only be invoked when your client imports a large list. If their list is growing organically from double opt-in subscribers via a web site form or the API, they won't ever require approval. We appreciate your understanding about why this is so necessary, and also welcome any feedback or suggestions that might help us improve this process even further.

0 comments so far

The mark-up profits start flowing

Posted by David Greiner on March 14, 2007 11:53 AM

When we put together the billing survey back in November last year, you guys (more than 500 of you!) told us what you needed loud and clear. Survey results are one thing, but actually seeing the features used in the wild is another thing altogether. We figured it would take plenty of customers a while to switch to the new system, especially considering it involved your clients providing their own credit card details instead of you invoicing them.

Boy we we wrong. Last week we did our first round of PayPal transfers of all the mark-up profit earned for the month of February. Even though we launched the update half way through the month, dozens of you had already earnt some very tidy profits indeed.

The best part is, the current figures for March will blow February out of the water! We're only 2 weeks in and it's looking like we'll be distributing at least 4-5 times more profit than our first month. We're wrapped with the response and can't thank you all enough for not only telling us what you needed, but absolutely embracing it when it arrived.

It's very exciting times for the MailBuild team and we've got some other highly requested updates coming out in the next few weeks. More on these updates here soon.

6 comments so far

New methods available for the MailBuild API

Posted by David Greiner on March 13, 2007 6:22 PM

Today I'm pleased to announce the launch of 3 new methods that are now available via the MailBuild API that make it much easier to keep your client's MailBuild list in synch with another application, like their own CRM tool for example. The new methods include:

• Subscriber.GetActive
  Basically gets a list of all active subscribers that have joined yo