HTML emails can be a great way of reaching out to your prospective customers and clients as they are more interactive and you can pack in great information with effective visuals. There are many email marketers that advise you against using HTML emails because

• The recipients may think they carry viruses or spyware
• HTML emails are often heavier than text emails
• The visuals can confuse your customers and clients
• If the images don’t load they may get a distorted version of your otherwise exceptionally well-prepared message

These are well-grounded apprehensions but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t send HTML emails. With evolved spam filters and ever-increasing bandwidth people are growing less and less touchy about receiving HTML emails.

There are some time-tested guidelines for preparing effective HTML emails and newsletters:

• Mind the width. An HTML email doesn’t equal a web page. Go ahead and create liquid HTML email layout as long as it doesn’t distort your email. A safer thing to do is decide what minimum and maximum width keeps your HTML email best looking and then keep your width accordingly. Different email clients have different sizes of windows and email reading areas.
• Use inline styling. You should definitely use stylesheet definitions to style your HTML elements (fonts, background colors, etc.) but use inline styling like <p style=”background-color:#c0c0c0; margin-bottom:5px;”> instead of using an external stylesheet. If you user is checking his or her messages without an Internet connection or if somehow the link has a problem it will destroy the entire layout of your HTML email.
• It’s OK to use tables. The practice of using tables for creating HTML layouts is disliked by contemporary designers as they mostly prefer DIV-based layouts. But that’s alright. For preparing HTML emails you can use tables for creating your layouts as not all email clients and applications are good at interpreting exact DIV dimensions, whereas tables are easily recognized.
• Use images sparingly. Images need to be fetched from an external link — just as the stylesheet file mentioned above — so in case they don’t load or if embedded image display is disabled in the recipient’s email client then your message may get lost, especially if most of your message is in the form of images. Use text as alternatives and besides, using colors and fonts you can create great HTML emails even without images.
• Test your email on various platforms. People use different email clients — both web based and desktop — to access their daily dose of emails and they may have different ways of formatting the same layout. Spend some time testing your emails on different email clients, operating systems, and even different devises.
• Eventually, it’s the message that counts. Really, what gets you the real deal is your email message. Have you got something really great to offer? Then present it with compelling text and a subject that makes people open the message immediately.

Do you know you can use Google Apps to create and manage your business email account, for free, and on top of that you also get to use the friendly Gmail interface. Yes, you no longer have to get stuck to a crappy web mail interface. When you use Google Apps to manage your business email and use the familiar Gmail interface you can

• Access your email from anywhere provided you have the net access.
• Use Gmail’s advanced search features with your business email too.
• Use the threaded conversations feature to track email interaction.
• Stop worrying about taking backups each time you need to change your computer or format your hard disk.
• Create 50 email accounts under your own domain for free.

In case you are wondering using the Gmail interface means you’ll have an email that looks like “yourname@gmail.com” that’s not the case. You’ll have a professional email like “yourname@yourdomain.com”, and no, you don’t even have to host your website with Google in order to use their email service.

All you need to have is a Google Apps account. You can create an account by heading to http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new. You’ll need to be the admin in order to create a successful account for your domain name, and you’ll need FTP and control panel access to your web hosting account.

Please note before proceeding: your emails may stop coming during the transition period because it takes some time to propagate the changes throughout the Internet. Also, if you end up messing up with your email account (it shouldn’t happen though) the author of this article is not responsible.

After entering your domain name you get a form where you can enter all the related information. Carefully fill in the details in the form, and to begin, you can just fill in the boxes that are required. When you submit this form you get a form where you create your admin username and password. Create them and note them down somewhere.

The proceeding page is important. This is where you actually verify (actually this should ideally by the first screen, but anyway) that you actually own the domain. The less geeky way is to choose the first option. It asks you to create an HTML file of a specific name, copy/paste a string in it, save it, and upload it into your web hosting root folder.

Once done, you click “I’ve completed the steps above” and you’re done with setting up your Google Apps account. But it’s not over yet. Email in normal circumstances is handled by your web host.

In order to use Google Apps for your business email you’ll need to log into your web hosting control panel. Then you go to the Mail section. There are some web hosts that automatically create the needed MX records so that you just have to select Gmail as your mailing interface. But there are very few of them.

Wondering from where did the phrase MX records pop up? MX records, in simple words, handle email associated with your domain. There can be multiple MX records associated with a particular domain name with different priorities (something like, use MX record A as top priority, if A is not available, then use B, and so on). So in your Mail section, you’ll need to create MX records that specify to your web host that you’re going to use Google Apps for your email instead of its own email servers.

In the mail management section of your web hosting control panel you’ll see an icon to the tune of “MX Entries” or something like that. Go there. If you are hosting multiple domains then you’ll need to select the domain that you are using with your Google Apps account. If there are already some MX records you can either delete them or lower their priority. The highest priority is 1, then after that, 2, and so on.

For email routing, you can select Automatically detect configuration.

There is a section that says “Add new record” where you can add the priority and the destination. One of our domains have the following MX Records setup configuration:

1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM

(priority 1, 5 and 10) and it works like a charm.

Here is what Google suggests:

Once you have saved these records, you can check whether they’re working or not buy heading to http://google.com/a/yourdomain.com and logging in using your login information. If it doesn’t work, don’t worry, it will once your new information has properly propagated.

Looking for a Gmail notifier for Google Apps in Ubuntu? A long time back we discussed here how to set up a Gmail notifier for your Google Apps account but that was in the context of Windows. You can have the same facility in Ubuntu too. The procedure is somewhat the same — you setup a separate Gmail account where all your Google Apps email is forwarded to and then you can setup a notifier for that Gmail account.

For Ubuntu there are multiple Gmail notifiers available but there are two that come highly recommended:

• CheckGmail: You can install this from Ubuntu’s Synaptic Package Manager. Simply search for it and install it. It handles multiple Gmail accounts and it shows a summary of your latest messages when you hover the cursor over its icon running in the top bar.
• Gmail Notifier: This is a decent app to get Gmail notifications but the display is not as good as CheckGmail, although it has a nifty icon.
• cGmail: This is a privately developed Gmail notifier for Ubuntu with quite a nice display.

If you think email marketing is passe you’d like to rethink. Email marketing is still one of the strongest business promotion exercises on the Internet and it is very important to learn how to create an effective and creative marketing email.

Your subject is very important when you are creating a marketing email. Most of your email recipients will open your email if they are intrigued by your subject. It should intrigue them. Make sure your subject doesn’t seem spammy and cliched — this way even if they know you and are used to getting mails from you they won’t open it. Read more on how to write a creative marketing email.

Although there are scores of Twitter applications available these days that you can use to access Twitter without having to visit the website, sometimes these applications, for instance TweetDeck, can cause strain on your PC resources. Just like many other function that you can perform from within your Gmail account, now you can manage even your Twitter account through Gmail using Google gadgets. The interface is not ideal, but at least you can constantly monitor the conversations, and once you know how to install one Twitter gadget, you’ll be able to try out many more.

First of all, you need to tell Gmail that you would like to use gadgets on Gmail. You can do this by clicking either the labs icon at the top, or first clicking Settings and then the Labs tab. Once you are there, you have to scroll down until you come across the section that lets you enable the “Add any gadget by URL” feature.

Once you have enabled this, save the settings. Then click the Gadgets tab. There you will find an input box. Enter this URL there:

http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml

and click the Add button.

The gadget will appear in the column where you contacts, labels and the various Gmail folders appear. Scroll down in case you cannot locate it. There will be links that will help you log into your Twitter account from there. Once you have logged in, you will be able to use Twitter through Gmail.

Would you like to use Gmail with Outlook Express?  Gmail gives you a free POP3 facility that can be used with any major desktop e-mail client like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. In this blog post we are going to see to use Gmail with Outlook Express.

In order to achieve this first you had to enable POP access Gmail. Click Settings (this you can find at the top right corner of your Gmail account.  From there you need to click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. Once you are there you need to select one of the following options:

Choose whatever option you want.

After this you have to load Outlook Express and create a new account. For this in your Outlook Express top menu click Tools and then Accounts…

There is an Add button there that further opens a sub-menu:

Click Mail… and you come across a new window that asks for your name. This would be the name that people see you when they get your e-mail. Enter it and click Next.

In the next screen you enter your Gmail e-mail account. Click Next after entering it. On the next screen you get to enter the POP and SMTP servers. In this case they are going to be:

POP: pop.gmail.com

SMTP: smtp.gmail.com

No need to check the “Secure Password Authentication checkbox. Click Next and
and then Finish.

This brings you back to the screen that lists all the accounts you’ve created. If this is the only account that exists, it is automatically selected, otherwise, select it, and click Properties.

In the first box you type a name that is going to distinguish this account from other accounts you create, for instance, “Gmail account”. The information for the other boxes is self-explanatory. You click on the Servers tab, and arrive at this screen:

Check the box “My server requires authentication”, and then click the Advanced tab.

Enter the information as it appears in the image above, click OK, and you’re done!

Isn’t it strange that up till now you couldn’t insert images into your Gmail messages? This is a fundamental feature that every e-mail service has.  Although prior to this you could easily attach images to your Gmail messages you couldn’t insert images.  Now you can.

Simply log into your Gmail account, click Settings (this must be at the top of your screen) and then click the Labs tab. Scroll down until you see this:

Just click Enable and save your settings. Now you will be able to insert images into your Gmail messages. In case you’re inserting images from another link the recipient will as usual have to click Display Images in order to see the image.

Do you have multiple Gmail accounts? If you do then maintaining all of them using a single browser can turn into a major hassle. Whenever you want to log into a Gmail account other than the one you are currently using you have to logout from your current account and then log into the other one. Even if you open different windows, due to the cookies you are taken to the currently open Gmail account. What if you want to go through multiple Gmail accounts at the same time? One option is running different browsers. For instance if I want to use two Gmail accounts simultaneously I open one account in Firefox and the other in Internet Explorer. Not an elegant solution but it works. Previously when I was using Thunderbird this was not a problem because then you can create POP accounts and then download e-mail from your Gmail accounts. But if you want to use web-based interface then you really need some workaround if you want to use multiple Gmail accounts at the same time. Some of the methods are explained at this link. They are not foolproof but nonetheless they may help you.