Mobilize Mail Opinion

If you like to create your email message content in Microsoft Word please read on as you may have some of your subscribers contacting you about funny characters in your message.

It seems that Microsoft Word automatically changes straight quotation marks to curly (smart or typographer’s) quotes as you type. This is fine if you are only authoring your works for non-email media.

When the smart quotes are converted to HTML, the quotes are converted to non-standard characters which end up littering your document with question mark symbols, squares and/or other garbage code.

For example have a look at the two images below.. The first image shows you the email message content in Microsoft Word and the second image shows you how the message actually looks in a text version of the email when read within Gmail. This is not to say HTML is immune from this issue. It really depends on your email client as to how the HTML is interpreted with non-standard characters but I think you will agree with me that the text version of the email message is just as important as the HTML message for your brand.

Figure 1 – Text Created in Word

Figure 2 – The results of HTML created in MS Word – note the squares

So how do you fix this issue?

You need to disable Microsoft Word’s Smart Quotes. Follow the steps below.

1. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect Options, then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.

2. Under Replace as you type, select or clear the “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes” check box.

Alternatively, you can copy your entire MS Word document over to a non Microsoft text editor (EditPlus, UltraEdit, TextPad, etc) and do a simple search and replace. Search and replace the smart quotes into standard quotes, apostrophe’s, dashes and dots if applicable.

Caution for authors creating HTML code for their email messages in MS Word:

Unless you have smart quotes disabled, it should be noted that smart quotes are not valid HTML code. Therefore, don’t even consider using MS Word to do HTML code unless you have the smart quotes feature disabled.

This will interest you all.

A very interesting study has been completed and the results are amazing!

The Epsilon Interactive report stated that 69% of email users know how to activate suppressed images, and 57% at least sometimes activate images in promotional messages from senders they buy from or have accounts with, or from senders to whom they’ve given their permission to send them email.

Whats interesting is that 30% don’t have an idea on how to activate images or don’t even know they exist.  This highlights the importance of creating email messages that degrade gracefully.

Check out Dave Shea’s article on how to degrade email content. Click here.

Many of you might already know the reason why spammers are now using images for their messages but just in case you don’t have a read of this article. 

Click here

“The United States and China remained atop the list of countries spewing spam for the third quarter, UK-based security vendor Sophos said Monday, and the former had the dubious honour of extending its lead in the battle for spam share.

According to Sophos, servers in the US sent 21.6 percent of the world’s spam during the August-September time frame. China, in second, accounted for 13.4 percent. France, South Korea, and Spain rounded out the top five. China’s share was nearly 7 percent off the previous quarter, while the US’s part declined by 1.6 percent.”

Source…
Almost makes you wonder how effective the can-spam really is…