On Message with Ben Gross

Callcentric Internet Phone Service Is a Solid Value

By Ben Gross
in

After researching my options for an Internet phone service, I chose Callcentric. I have been happy with my selection, as the feature set meets my needs and both the service and the call quality have been good and reliable. My Callcentric number serves as my primary public number and I send most calls directly to voicemail, which I then receive both in both MP3 and transcribed form via the Phonetag service. I wrote about PhoneTag in Voicemail is Dead. Long Live Voicemai. Callcentric uses the widely supported SIP standard that is interoperable with many software-based and hardware-based VoIP phones.

Features

Overall I find the pricing quite reasonable for a secondary line. The phone number, E911 cost recovery fee, and my minutes are typically less than $4 a month total. Inbound calls are 1.5 cents a minute, outbound domestic calls are about 2 cents and the international rates are competitive. The service offers a respectable feature set that includes Caller ID with Name (CNAM), call forwarding, selective forwarding, simultaneous ring, call blocking, and voicemail, which can optionally receive via an email with a MP3 attachment. The service allows you to register multiple phone numbers for $1.95 a month each and you may assign multiple numbers for the outbound caller ID, although the configuration is somewhat complicated. The basic service allows for three incoming channels. Additional channels are $1 a month. Callcentric also offers business features such as SIP trunking and calling packages for call centers, IVR services, and conference rooms. In addition to the pay per minute options,

Callcentric has a few minor downsides. Numbers cannot receive SMSs and receiving faxes requires a separate number. The address book is weak. For example, each record can only contain one name field and one phone number field, so you must create multiple records for people with multiple phone numbers. The address book does not support numbers that contain a plus or a dash, which makes importing existing numbers more difficult. There is no import mechanism for vCard files. Fortunately, I manage my address book on my computer, which is also synched to my phone, so the Callcentric address book has not been an issue.

Callcentric on the iPhone

The Callcentric setup gives me the option use a SIP softphone or a hardware phone to turn it into a real phone line should I ever choose to do so. When I travel, I use an Acrobits SIP client on my iPhone (also offered in Android flavor). Groundwire for the iPhone, is Acrobits business oriented softphone that includes call transfer and attended transfer, call waiting, call conferencing and multiple lines. The Acrobits clients work well and user interface for configuring the SIP credentials is far more usable and streamlined than other products I have used. Callcentric recently released an iPhone VoIP Call back App that is similar to many low-cost call back services, but I prefer to use a standard SIP client.

Notes on Signing Up

Callcentric accepts local number portability transfers both in and out of the service. This means you can transfer any existing number to Callcentric or take your number with you if you leave, you are not locked in. Number portability is labor intensive and thus costs $25 per number.

If you choose to say that you live outside the US when you sign up, you won’t be charged the 911/E911 recovery fee. I don’t recommend this as cannot change this option and you would need to provision a new line to enable 911 service. However, if you are out of the country for an extended length of time you may enable 911 service on sign up and later specify that you are currently out of the US or Canada. I believe Callcentric will stop charging you the fee during that time. This should give you the option to turn it back on later, where the other one will not.

Callcentric Compared with Google Voice

By any measure Google Voice is impressive. Its SMS service is particular convenient its automated voicemail transcriptions are nearly instantaneous. I find the human transcription of PhoneTag far more reliable, but it does mean there is often a five-minute delay. When I first signed up with Callcentric Google Voice did not yet offer number portability. Google Voice still has significant restrictions on number portability and only mobile numbers can effectively ported into the service Port your number into Google Voice FAQ. Additionally, Google voice does not currently offer SIP connectivity, and this is one feature I appreciate with Callcentric as it allows me to use the service as a secondary phone line and to make outbound calls with the caller ID of my public number. It is possible to use services such as sipgate or Tropo to use your Google Voice service with SIP, but this complicates the process.

In addition to Callcentric’s pay per minute plan, they offer a personal domestic unlimited plan for $5.95, and office domestic unlimited plan for $8.95, a service provider unlimited plan for $19.95, and unlimited international plans starting at $24.95. Overall, I am very happy with Callcentric’s service and I recommend it.

Published August 29, 2011

Stop Hunching Over Your Laptop with the LapDawg X4

By Ben Gross
in

Working on a laptop in locations without an ergonomic setup can be a serious pain in the neck. I mean that in the literal sense. People frequently work on laptops hunched over desks at work or from home in locations that span the home office desk, to the kitchen table, to the couch or even the bed. The problem that a few hours of responding to your email hunched over the laptop on a desk or table of the wrong height or from the couch can lead to a few hours of pain from working in positions that seem comfortable until you suddenly realize what you have done to your back and neck.

The LapDawg X4 is a potential solution that works well but has a few caveats. Let us start with the good parts. The LapDawg X4 has a large and solidly constructed metal tray attached to two legs with three joints on each leg that can rotate 360 degrees and lock in at 7.5-degree increments. You make adjustments to the legs by pushing in a button in the joint and selecting the angle of the joint. The fine-grained control gives you a many potential combinations to position the LapDawg to fit your current setting. The aluminum tray has ridges along the back and a rubber wrist guard along the bottom so you do not need to worry about your laptop slipping off. The LapDawg X4 works well as an ergonomic stand for your desk, as a lap desk for a chair, couch, or bed, or as a freestanding small table.

The biggest potential problem with the LapDawg X4 is that while the tray is very solidly constructed, the legs can feel somewhat shaky depending on the configuration and it is not hard to put the LapDawg X4 in a position that may be unstable for a laptop and allow it to flip backwards. The large size makes that it can hold even the most stately of laptops up to about 25 pounds of weight, this also means that it is 23” inches wide you need a substantial amount of space to accommodate the desk so measure your favorite narrow couch or chair first. The LapDawg X4 weighs a bit over 5 pounds itself so don’t plan on tossing into a bag and taking it to the café with you. None of these aspects may be a problem depending on your use.

The LapDawg X4 instruction sheet helpfully lists a number of common leg positions for the LapDawg, although there are many other possible options. I found the configuration I preferred the most was not one of those listed.

Overall, I would recommend the LapDawg X4 as an ergonomic desk stand or a lap desk that can accommodate many possible configurations. With a little practice in adjusting the legs, it is easy to find a configuration that is highly customized for your favorite working position, but you may want to pay attention the first few times to make sure it is stable. The LapDawg X4 costs $89 and comes with a lifetime guarantee.

Published April 25, 2011

Inbox Love – A New Conference on Email

By Ben Gross
in

Inbox Love, a new conference on email, will be held on February 25th at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mountain View, California. The speakers and sessions look great. 500 Startups’ (Dave McClure) is producing the conference along with OtherInbox (Joshua Baer) and AwayFind (Jared Goralnick).

I attended and spoke at the pre-event meeting for Inbox Love in December. The attendees and speakers were excellent and it looks like the main event will be even better. I wrote about it in Inbox Love and Recent Innovation in Email.

If you had asked me a few years ago if I thought that in 2011 there would be a new email conference and a whole host of fantastic new email products and services, I would have said no. I’m happy to say that I would have been wrong. Registration for Inbox Love is now open.

Sessions at Inbox Love include:

  • The Implicit Social Graph
  • Inbox Infatuation: Will They Still Love Your Product in the Morning?
  • The Psychology of Behavioral Change: Proven results from 1 million+ emails that delight, engage, and influence users
  • WHEW! This Email Smells Bad…Has It Expired?
  • If They Mated: Email, Voice, SMS & The Next Generation of Communication
  • The Love Connection: Platforms & The Future of Consumer Email
  • The Love Connection: Platforms & The Future of Business Email
  • The Integration of Email & Social
  • Privacy vs. Personality: What’s in an Email Address?
  • NextGen Email Apps

The list of Speakers at Inbox Love includes:

  • Joshua Baer - Founder & CEO, OtherInbox
  • Victoria Bellotti - Principal Scientist & Manager at PARC
  • Bill Boebel - VP of Strategy, Rackspace
  • Jeff Bonforte - CEO, Xobni
  • Manlio Carrelli - CMO, Intermedia
  • Amy Ellis - Head of Integrations & Partnerships, MailChimp
  • Miriam Geller - Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Mail
  • Jared Goralnick - Founder & CEO, AwayFind.com
  • Auren Hoffman - CEO of Rapleaf
  • Fletcher Jones - Product Lead, AOL Mail
  • Pierre Khawand - Founder, People-OnTheGo
  • Jeff Lawson - Co-Founder & CEO, Twilio
  • Dan Martell - Co-founder, Flowtown
  • Dave McClure - Founding Partner, 500 Startups
  • Paul McDonald - Product Lead, Gmail
  • Scott McMullan - Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise
  • Josh Merchant - Co-Founder & CTO, Lymbix, Inc.
  • Alex Moore - CEO, Baydin
  • John Robb - Senior Director — Zimbra products & marketing, VMware
  • Isaac Saldana - Co-founder & CEO, SendGrid
  • Tom Sather - Email Deliverability Consultant, Return Path
  • Mark Schmulen - General Manager, Social Media, Constant Contact, Inc.
  • Ramit Sethi - Author, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”
  • Jonathan B. Spira - CEO & Chief Analyst, Basex
  • Rahul Vohra - Co-founder & CEO, Rapportive
Published February 14, 2011

ForeverSave Prevents Lost Work on the Mac

By Ben Gross
in

It’s happened to all of us. You are busy writing, entering data, or working on a slide deck and all of a sudden something freezes and then the application crashes. If either we recently saved the document all is well, otherwise the inevitable explicative follows. It is 2011 and there is no excuse for not having autosave, but there are still a depressing number of applications that do not automatically save documents. Blaming the user who lost work to an application or operating system crash is blaming the victim. People are far better served by applications that automatically name, save, and version their files without requiring manual intervention. This way users can easily undo or revert to an older version after application crashes, machine hangs, and power outages, no swearing like a sailor necessary.

Tool Force Software’s ForeverSave ($15) largely solves this problem for Mac OS X applications. ForeverSave allows you to configure the application to automatically save documents from many applications including Apple’s iWork, Microsoft Office, and most Adobe products. The configuration process is quick and straightforward. You simply select the applications that you want to enable autosave. There are options to save after a fixed time interval or when switching to another application.

ForeverSave can also automatically create backup copies of your documents. You can set the maximum number of backup copies and a maximum size for the backups overall. One advantage of multiple backup copies is that it is that you can quickly preview old versions of the document with QuickLook. Restoring an old version is a one click operation. One interesting feature is database sharing. This allows you to share all the historical versions of a document, which is useful to show a colleague how a project evolved over time.

If you use any of Apple’s iWork applications including Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, then you absolutely want to use ForeverSave. The applications in iWork are well designed and I use them often, but unfortunately, as of the most recent version iWork ‘09, Apple has not seen fit to include an autosave feature. Each of the applications crash periodically, It also means that you have lost any work form the last time you remembered to manually save. If you have not named and saved the document at all yet, then everything is gone.

When an iWork applications crashes, all remnants of unsaved work is gone. After a recent crash with Keynote, I decided to experiment to see if I could find any traces on my file system. I scanned my temp files and the swap files and found nothing other than the images in the document. This is a terrible oversight and I expect better from some of Apple’s high-profile applications. Judging from the many complaints I found on the Apple discussion boards and elsewhere online, I’m not remotely alone.

Overall I highly recommend ForeverSave, the price is well worth the insurance against lost work. I experience two annoyances when using the application. First, saving is a blocking operation in the iWork applications, so if you have a large document such as a Keynote slide deck with many slides it will force you to wait each time it saves the document. This is technically the fault of iWork and not ForeverSave, but it is still a detractor. The second annoyance is that ForeverSave requires you to name the document the first time. This typically comes up when I start to work on a document and right when I get into a flow, then the save window pops up asking me to name the file the first time so it can save. I would rather the application not interrupt me and simply pick a reasonable name and let me rename it later.

ForeverSave is $15 and has a 30-day trial. ForeverSave Lite is a stripped down version that offers autosaving only, without backups, versions, QuickLook, or database sharing.

Published January 31, 2011

2011 CEAS Conference Call for Papers

By Ben Gross
in

CEAS 2011–the Collaboration, Electronic messaging, Anti-Abuse and Spam Conference will be held in Perth in Australia September 1-2, 2011. This will be the 8th annual gathering for the event formerly known as the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam. Curtin University’s Anti Spam Research Lab in the Digital Ecosystems & Business Intelligence Institute will host the conference.

There are nine conference tracks:

  • Email Spam
  • Web Spam & Spam 2.0
  • Spam & Security in Social Networks
  • Cyber Crime
  • Spam Economics
  • Network Security
  • Information Technology Security
  • Security Technologies
  • Security Management

The CEAS call for papers is available as Word and PDF document, although not as HTML. The relevant dates for potential authors are:

  • Abstract deadline: April 5, 2011
  • Submission deadline: April 15, 2011
  • Author notifications: June 15, 2011
  • Final accepted papers due: Aug 15, 2011

Proceedings including the full text of papers from previous CEAS conferences are available from the ceas.cc site, which has not been updated to include material for the 2011 conference.

Published January 24, 2011

Time Machine vs. CrashPlan for Backups

By Ben Gross
in

Trouble in Time Machine Land

In my recent article, A Simple and Effective Backup Strategy for Mac OS X, where I recommended a three part backup system:

  1. a full disk clone,
  2. local incremental backups with Apple’s Time Machine, and
  3. networked incremental backups with CrashPlan.

I found Time Machine problematic for my own setup, for reasons I explain below, so I now use CrashPlan for both local and networked backups.

For most people with configurations that are not highly customized or complicated, Time Machine is a great “set and forget backup” solution. The primary interface is a single on or off toggle switch. Its ease of use can make the difference between having backups and not having backups for many. At the same time, Time Machine has some notable quirks and limitations that can make it far less desirable in some circumstances. In these cases CrashPlan provides a solid alternative for local backups in addition to network backups. CrashPlan also has the advantage that it works equally well on Windows and Linux.

Clones Are Key to Fast Recovery Time

Let me emphasize that maintaining a recent clone is the key for you to rapidly recover your data in the case of a disk failure or theft. Most incremental backup solutions, including Time Machine and CrashPlan, do not backup your entire computer including all the system files and boot records. This means that you must first reinstall your operating system and then restore your files from the incremental backup on to the newly installed operating system.

The process of recovering from a disk failure with a clone is much faster and more efficient since you can connect your cloned disk and boot from it. You computer will be in the same state as it was when you made the clone. You will only have to restore files that have changed since you last made the clone. No other recovery process is nearly as quick recent clone and an incremental backup. The difference is substantial.

Advantages of Time Machine

  • It’s free, supported by Apple and ships with every copy of Mac OS X
  • The setup is impressively simple and it generally just works after that
  • The overall user experience for backup and recovery is substantially better than most alternatives
  • You can manually mount a Time Machine disk on any computer and copy files from it

Disadvantages of Time Machine

  • When you restore from a Time Machine disk, the backup is invalidated and you must start your backups anew
  • Time Machine only backs up changes to your files once an hour, so there is always a potential lag in your backups
  • If you use FileVault, Time Machine will only backup your home directory when you log out
  • If you use FileVault, you can only restore your entire home directory (missing out on the great restore interface) unless your home directory is on Mac OS X Server
  • Time Machine can get confused if you plug more than one Time Machine backup disk into the computer
  • Moving a backup to a new computer is a complicated process and typically requires editing system files

Personal Observations About Time Machine

  • The combination of FileVault and Time Machine makes logging out very slow
  • I found the Time Machine volume occasionally got corrupted and I would have start over
  • Time Machine would sometimes cause large amounts of disk IO with high memory usage that substantially slow my machine down. This would typically happen after longer periods of not backing up due to travel etc.

Advantages of CrashPlan

  • Backups are continuous and files are backed up as soon as they change (note while CrashPlan can be used in local mode for free, continuous backups require a subscription to CrashPlan Central)
  • All backups are encrypted by default
  • Straightforward to configure multiple local and networked backup destinations

Disadvantages of CrashPlan

  • You must use the CrashPlan software to restore a backup, it needs to be installed first for recovery
  • Higher memory usage with 64-bit Java on Snow Leopard (see note below)
  • User interface is functional but, not nearly as nice as Time Machine, it’s also a bit slow to start up
  • If you use FileVault, you must be logged as the FileVault user for backups to happen

Personal Observations About CrashPlan

  • Simple fix improves memory usage
  • Appears to have much smaller impact on my system resources once memory is reduced
  • FileVault complicates install process

Notes on Reducing CrashPlan Memory Usage

I found that CrashPlan could use up significant amounts of memory with the 64-bit Java on Snow Leopard. The most recent version of CrashPlan places a 512 MB memory limit on the process, but that is still quite large. I limit my to CrashPlan process to 150 MB and it has not caused any problems, although this is lower than you will generally see recommended and you will want to carefully monitor your logs to look for memory errors if you set it this low. This post CrashPlan using too much memory on Mac OS X from offTheHill explains how to reduce the memory footprint of CrashPlan.

Published January 10, 2011

Evaluating the Usefulness of Quora for Email Topics

By Ben Gross
in

Quora is an online question and answer service founded by former Facebook employees that has received high marks for overall quality of questions and responses compared to many of its competitors. Quora originally launched as a private beta early in 2010 and opened to the public in July 2010.

The service has since gained several hundred thousand users; although reports vary between 200 and 500 thousand users. Quora also recently experienced significant performance problems. The service has received additional attention due to founders and executives candidly responding to questions about their company or former company on Quora. Here is a brief look at the state of email related questions on Quora.

Top Level Categories for Email on Quora

Underneath these broad top-level categories, the hierarchy is limited. For example, the only server-based products with their own categories are: Postfix, Qmail, Microsoft Exchange, and Exim. Quora users are free to create their own categories, so the existing ones imply some level of topic interest, at least by users willing and able to create new categories. Some categories such as Email Statistics only have one question. The full hierarchy is available at Email Ontology page on Quora.

Gmail has the largest number of subtopics:

Each item in Quora is actually represented by a unique name so the URL structure is flat similar to Wikipedia. For example:

The quality of the questions and the quality of answers–for questions that receive answers–varies widely. For example, the question “Is there any Linux email client that will work with Exchange 2010?” received seven answers, most of them brief. A more specific question “Can you create bespoke merge tags in MailChimp or other ESPs?” received slightly more specific answers. On the other hand, the author of the question “What is qmail?” could have easily answered his own question with a single query on Google or even a glance at Wikipedia, which has a healthy Qmail entry. The question still received a reasonable, but brief answer.

In general, Quora seems to not be the best place to answer specific technical questions about email products and services, but it may be worth a quick check. Vendors and service providers may also want to consider responding to questions, although most established products hopefully already have a well-supported forum where users can ask and receive answers to technical problems.

Quora is still young and the developers and community will need to actively work to continue keep the quality of questions and answers high. Hopefully, Quora will also develop a more sophisticated search mechanism with filtering controls. I personally find the combined search and navigation box unnecessarily difficult to work with. The AJAX is too complicated and I have to regularly reload the page in order to clear a result. The way it currently steal mouse focus is annoying. Overall I have found Quora an interesting source and I look forward to watching it develop.

Published January 4, 2011

A Simple and Effective Backup Strategy for Mac OS X

By Ben Gross
in

Disk is inexpensive compared to the value of your time and data. My personal backup configuration consists of three types of backups. The following combination has proven itself over the last several years and I recommend it. It includes 1) A full disk clone, 2) an incremental backup, and 3) an online backup service. This setup is redundant, quick to configure, needs little maintenance, and allows for rapid recovery of data, even with a catastrophic failure.

Details of the three part backup strategy:

  1. A clone is a replica of your disk. One great feature of Mac OS X is that you can boot directly from a clone. This means if your hard drive dies, you can reboot from a clone on an external drive and be back to work in minutes rather than hours. I recommend SuperDuper ($28) as the user interface is very well done. Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent alternative that is free to use, although the author encourages donations. Both applications support scheduling backups for a time when your system is not in use. Both applications also support incremental updates to substantially reduce the amount of time needed for subsequent backups. The hard drive for your clone must be as large as the amount of data you wish to back up.
  2. An incremental backup application called Time Machine ships with every copy of Mac OS X that archives any file changes every hour. Time Machine has a unique time-based interface that allows you to easily find and restore previous versions of files. Overall, Time Machine is simple to use and works well unattended, but it does have several detractors. First, if you have a hard disk crash, you must manually reinstall the base operating system from the DVD and then use Time Machine to a restore the rest of your data. This makes time machine most useful in cases of accidental file deletion or data corruption. Time Machine works very well when combined with a clone as you can quickly restore from a clone and use Time Machine to restore any files more recent than the clone version. Time Machine is far less useful on drives with FileVault enabled. I recommend giving Time Machine at least two times as much hard drive space as the amount of data you want to back up.
  3. An online backup service allows you to have offsite backups for cases of theft, natural disaster, or large mugs of coffee. Online services also allow laptop users to continue to make backups in any place that has a network connection. I have used the CrashPlan service for about 18 months and I find the service reasonably priced and reliable. CrashPlan automatically archives file changes in real-time and encrypts all backups. This is nice if you use it on a laptop because it means that you have backups even when you travel. CrashPlan also allows online restores from a web-based interface. The unlimited service is $25 a year for a 10GB service, $50 a year for unlimited service for one computer, and $120 a year for a family unlimited plan for up to ten computers. Multiyear subscriptions are discounted.

CrashPlan has a backup seeding service for $125 where they send you a 1TB drive. You then run the initial backup locally and ship the drive back to CrashPlan. Depending on the size of your disk and the speed of your network connection, the initial backup can easily take weeks. Companion emergency recovery services are also $125. Expedited shipping is extra. CrashPlan also offers a computer-to-computer backup mode. This means you could backup to another machine in your house or to a computer in a friend’s house. The computer-to-computer backup feature is free. The paid version provides real-time versioning with fine-grained control over the versioning settings, stronger encryption, the ability to restore from the web, and the client is ad-free. CrashPlan works with Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux operating systems

I last wrote about backup options in We Need Simple Backup Solutions for Complicated Data.

You should follow me on Twitter.
Published December 10, 2010

Inbox Love and Recent Innovation in Email

By Ben Gross
in

A Whirlwind Tour of Recent Email Developments

Even casual email industry observers will have noticed an impressive number of new email related announcements. I have not seen as much innovation in email products from many different vendors in a long time. I was fortunate to attend the recent Inbox Love private launch event that included participants from both large companies and startups all working on email projects. I gave a presentation on “Three Myths of Email and Identity” that I’ll talk more about in a later column. The public Inbox Love conference will be in Spring 2011 in the SF Bay Area and the call for speakers is now open.

The event was a refreshing change from the Email is dead, as IM, SMS, social networks, etc. will kill it discussion. New channels always change and fragment communications options, but rarely does a widespread media disappear overnight. Tomas Nonnenmacher’s History of the U.S. Telegraph Industry points out that Western Union did not even divest itself of its telegraph infrastructure until 1988.

Facebook

Without a doubt the announcement of the new Facebook Messaging platform generated the most buzz. The service is still in testing and not open to the public. Two official blog posts from Facebook engineers provide more details. Joel Seligstein’s See the Messages that Matter and Kannan Muthukkaruppan’s The Underlying Technology of Messages are both worth reading. The Facebook Messages main page offers a brief visual tour and the option to request an invitation. Facebook Help Center for Messages should answer most common questions.

Google

Google released a series of new email features including the Gmail Priority Inbox, which segments email into three categories–an automagic category of important and unread messages, a category for starred messages, and a remainder category. The Official Gmail Blog post Email overload? Try Priority Inbox by Doug Aberdeen offers more detail and a video explaining how priority inbox work. Finally, the Gmail Help page for Priority Inbox should answer most questions about the product.

In the mobile realm, Google user experience designer Brett Lider explain how the Gmail web client for mobile Safari acts more like a native application

Gmail for Android team members discuss the updated Gmail app in Android Market. This is a welcome development as it means that Android users no longer have to wait for carrier updates, which can be slow to non-existent to run the latest version of Gmail on Android devices.

The announcement for the Google Apps Marketplace describes how developers can increase the reach by listing products and services on the Google Apps Marketplace. Here is the result for listing for the query “email” on the Google Apps Marketplace since it does not have a category on its own. Finally, while the service was announced in May, many seemed to have missed the release of Google Apps Script, which is a JavaScript-based scripting language for automating Google’s applications in the cloud that includes email services.

Yahoo

The latest Yahoo! Mail Beta that includes a redesigned interface that is faster, more mobile friendly, integrated with Twitter, and includes support for Applications. You can find more details in the Yahoo! Mail overview and Yahoo! Mail features page. Yahoo VP of Engineering, Mike Curtis, describes the new features including the apps in his post Yahoo! Mail Beta technology update More information on Applications in Yahoo! Mail is available in the post Yahoo! Mail is Open for Development on the Yahoo Developer Network.

AOL

AOL announced it’s upcoming Project Phoenix, offers a modern webmail experience which will be a welcome update to users of AOL Mail service. [Project Phoenix still requires an invitation] (http://phoenix.aol.com/), but it should be available to the general public by early next year. Business Insider offers a walkthrough in Here’s What We Think About AOL’s New E-Mail Service.

More Innovation and New Email Startups

MailChimp has been around far too long to be a startup, but it has only recently gained more widespread attention. Their API is full featured and in order to encourage developers to use it they have announced $1 Million Integration Fund .

Postbox builds an impressive number of features on top of the Mozilla Thunderbird code base. The recent major update Postbox 2 adds more options for grouping, including unified accounts, task management, and quick replies.

The organizers of the Inbox Love have email related startups of their own. Jared Goralnick is founder of the AwayFind service and Joshua Baer is cofounder of the OtherInbox service. Both companies offer options email organization and prioritization. AwayFind specializes in prioritization and notifications the service will contact you by text message, IM, or Twitter Direct Message if you receive messages from an important contact. The service can even call you and read your message using text to speech. OtherInbox specializes in prioritizing and filtering email and notifying you of important messages.

Let me know what else I missed.

You should follow me on Twitter.

Published November 30, 2010

12 Checklists to Reduce Errors in Email Campaigns

By Ben Gross
in

Why Checklists Matter

Realizing that you made an easily preventable mistake just after sending out your email campaign is incredibly frustrating experience. Errors in email campaigns can reduce deliverability, limit open rates, and confuse customers. Unfortunately, it happens to everyone.

Checklists are a simple and effective way to significantly reduce errors even though they sometimes feel unnecessary or overbearing. Noted surgeon and author Atul Gawande wrote an excellent article for the New Yorker in 2007 titled The Checklist describing the substantial reduction in errors that checklist brought to medicine and piloting airplanes. The article is well worth the read as is Gawande’s 2009 book-length treatment of the topic The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right includes examples from the restaurant and construction industries.

While checklists may seem critical for tasks where lives are at stake, they’re very useful for many tasks. For example, Jon Udell talks about using checklists for software development and web development.

Gawande notes that the research on checklists has shown that effective checklists focus on brevity and readability and not completeness. Checklists work best when they only important items that are likely to be missed. Gawande says that effective checklists must be tested and refined. He has even produced a Checklist for Checklists .

Checklists for Email Campaigns

Executing a well-done email campaign is a complex endeavor with many subparts. The unique characteristics of both your list and your organization will mean that there is likely no single existing list that will be a perfect fit for you. Here are XXX checklists for you to use as a guide for creating your own checklist. Many of these checklists have substantial overlap, but by looking at multiple lists you are more likely to find one that is a better starting point.

Checklists for Avoiding Common Pitfalls

10-Point Email Quality-Control Checklist from Lyris focuses on potential errors when constructing email messages.

Targeted Email Advertising Checklist from Alex Cohen has a good all-around set of recommendations.

Prelaunch Email Campaign Checklist from the V12 Group collects important items to check before you send your campaign.

TailoredMail Email Campaign Checklist (PDF) is an extensive list of items to check before sending out your campaign.

Before You Hit “Send,” Consult Your email Checklist from ClickZ includes a good set of important points worth considering for your own list.

Annual Email Marketing Strategy Review Checklist from MailerMailer is a nice collection to help you step back and review your email campaign strategy.

Deliverability and CAN-SPAM Checklists

Lyris’ Opt-In Email Marketer’s Checklist for Inbox Delivery (PDF) is a 10 point list to help you ensure that your messages reach your recipients inboxes.

A Daily Checklist For Deliverability 07/07/2010 from MediaPost includes important high-level points you should regularly consider about the deliverability of your campaigns.

phplist Documentation: Tasks to do before you send your first email is an solid checklist of technical points to verify before sending your email.

A CAN-SPAM Checklist from Mickey Chandler is good checklist for CAN-SPAM compliance.

Complying With CAN-SPAM: A 10-Point Checklist for Marketers from ClickZ is from 2004, but still a still a useful list.

Email Failed: A checklist & Analysis on cause of Email Failure from the Bravo Technology Center is a terse list of factors to investigate for email problems not exclusive to email marketing campaigns.

Published November 2, 2010