Eyejot, the web’s leading video mail solution, today announced an advanced template system for its PRO Plus users to control the presentation of video mail messages.

Eyejot’s new template manager allows its customers to create libraries of stylized designs that can be applied to video messages. This allows Eyejot users to create and send video mail that carries a look that’s complimentary to a marketing or sales initiative, or a product or company brand. What Eyejot has done is, basically, create an easy way to author and send video mail and to wrap various elements in a design that the customer controls.

This new template feature was created in response to customer demand for those users that have long valued Eyejot’s ability to send video mail and wanted a way to ensure that their own corporate branding was preserved, as well as giving them the chance to tie other important elements of their business into the video mail sent by Eyejot.

Eyejot users can created templates for email, message viewing and their own user pages.

Industry expert, founder and chief evangelist for Email Data Source Bill McCloskey wrote about Eyejot in a post made to ClickZ today. While describing some of successes and failures in the video mail space he wrote "tools like Eyejot are pretty exciting. Eyejot lets you create on the fly personalized video e-mails quickly and very cheaply."

An alert user told us that they had been having problems downloading videos from their Eyejot inbox and we traced it to a bug we introduced a while ago. Suffice it to say, we've found and fixed the bug and everyone should be able save selected videos from their inbox to their computer. If you're not familiar with this feature, you can learn more about it here.

Although we test things out extensively and try to find and fix bugs before you see them, that's not always possible so we're grateful to those of you that take the time to alert us to any anomalies you discover.

We've heard from some of our customers that notification messages destined for their Comcast mailboxes are not being delivered. We also heard from our friends at Amazon that they were having similar problems. And then additional confirmation came from the good folks at WhatCounts (one of the leading email service providers) that Comcast was using new filtering software from Cloudmark and was running into all sorts of problems.

For the sake of our customers we hope Comcast is able to improve their Cloudmark resources quickly. We'll continue to monitor things here. If you have any additional information or feedback you'd like to share with us, please send it to our support team through our contact page.

Eyejot's servers will experience between 5 and 10 minutes of downtime on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 6PM PDT. Our colocation facility is performing maintenance in an area that houses the optical fiber lines that provide our Internet service. The interruption is expected to be very brief.

The Wall Street Journal's Emily Steel mentioned Eyejot in her article Video Gets Entrée Into Email which was posted live today. The article primarily focused on Goodmail's recently announced product aimed at helping publishers get video players successfully placed and operational inside email messages.

This has long been a challenge for web-based email platforms. They have, for security and control reasons, intentionally stripped out HTML embed and object code, which is required to, for example, host a Flash player (or more nefarious playloads). So, the industry has reacted by either embedding static images that look like they're part of a movie and invite the reader to "click to view" or, more creatively, have utilized animated GIF images to expose some motion in the hopes of guaranteeing a "click to view."

The Goodmail solution is certainly interesting but it's primarily an agreement they've established with only a few ISPs. So their solution isn't universal. For us that's a problem. While it might be really cool to play video inside of an email message, unless it's a solution that can be used all the time, everywhere, it may ultimately be less effective than more traditional techniques.

Incidentally, Eyejot intends to offer an animated GIF option for its notification messages to PRO Plus members in the near future.

If you're a PRO Plus user and frequently use the attachment feature to add documents or web links to your Eyejot messages then you'll likely appreciate a new feature we've just deployed. It's our recently attached item list and it allows you to, very quickly, attach one or more previously used attachments to a new message.

One scenario where this new feature may be appreciated is for people using Eyejot to perform customer support tasks. You'll be able to quickly identify and re-attach documents and web links you've used in previous messages, reducing the time it takes to support your customers.

We frequently send web links and documents to Eyejot customers when we do our own customer support and this new feature will save us a bunch of time too!

Found this great post from Jan Connair entitled Admittedly, I am Totally Hip and Cool... in which she had great things to say about Eyejot. She learned about our platform from a friend and, it seems, came to appreciate the simplicity and value that video messaging could offer. We love the detail and energy her post contained and hope you visit her site to read more.

Trevor Long posted a great blog entry entitled The Ultimate Personalized Email & Video Email Service Provider in which he extolled the virtues of video as a communications medium and, graciously, mentioned Eyejot. Trevor also provided a test case that involved another Eyejot user named Bob Rodkin. Bob recently shared with his twitter followers a video which described his early experiences with our platform, completely unsolicited, and the incredible impact it had in terms of helping him connect with a small group of people.

We've just deployed two important features that keep Eyejot on the right side of permission-oriented communications: user-managed opt-out control for new message notifications and the ability to suspend view alerts on a per-message or per-user basis.

The first feature has obvious benefits and has been planned for some time. While Eyejot is designed expressly for one-to-one or one-to-few communications some people have found it immensely useful as a marketing communications tool. In order that these new uses are properly supported every outbound email notification message will carry an opt-out link. The link will allow the recipient to prevent future email notifications from being sent to them from a particular sender.

The view alerts suspension feature is for PRO Plus members and allows them to turn off view alerts for a particular message or for alerts generated on behalf of a particular person. Both options can be very useful if you find that one of your Eyejot messages is getting read often.