John Sinnott

Some of you may have noticed that last week's newsletter went out a bit late, and arrived in a horrible looking text-only format. Well, it looks like it will be that way for a couple of weeks.

IB recently moved over to their servers, and for some reason the bulk e-mail system that DVDTalk uses was messed up and won't send out e-mail. After the tech guys worked on it for a couple of days it was decided to use something that IB already had in place. The downside is that a text version of the newsletter had to be sent out to large e-mail providers (AOL, GMail, Hotmail, etc.) Others should get the regular html version.

I have absolutely no idea why that is, but I have been assured that it is indeed the case. They are working on fixing this problem, but I've been told a work around is going to take "a couple of weeks". So I wanted to let everyone know.

When I write the newsletter this week I'm going to make the text version, so hopefully it won't look quite as bad as the one that was sent out yesterday.

Thanks for your patience.

Trevor

HR, thanks for the explanation and for thanks in advance for making the next one more readable.

Music

I'm getting the normal newsletter as well as the text only newsletter... are we supposed to be getting both? Comcast email

John Sinnott

Hmmmm....you're supposed to only get one or the other. I'll look into it Mr. Music. Thanks for letting me know.

ibtravel

Here's the current status of our html newsletters:

In order to send html email to a lot of recipients at a major email service (like AOL or Hotmail) without getting most of them flagged as spam, you have to go through a process of "whitelisting" (i.e. convincing them that you're not a spammer and that they should deliver your messages instead of flagging them all as spam). We've started that process with most of the major email providers, but I've been told that it can take weeks, and each different provided has its own set of hoops to jump through. As we get whitelisted by certain providers, we'll start adding those users to the list of people that are getting html emails.

@Mr. Music -- The type of message you received was probably a multipart message, which is to say that it's a message with two versions: an html version that your email client should display as html if it has html enabled, and a text version in case your client doesn't have html enabled. I've noticed that some clients (including GMail, which handles these emails as two separate messages in the same thread) aren't following the standards describing what they're supposed to do with them (which is to show html if enabled, or text if not enabled).

Generally speaking, it's best to send bulk emails like newsletters using this multipart structure, as a lot of spam filters will completely block emails that only contain html.

Music

I'm not sure if that is what I received.

I use MS Outlook 2007.

I received the text only email at 7:51PM (it shows it was sent at 7:48PM) which was prefaced with:

and then received the normal html edition at 8:09PM (same as the sent time - no 3 minute difference like the text only edition above.).

Not a big deal for me, just an FYI to you, so you can try to fix an issue if there is one.

ibtravel

Thanks for the clarification. I'll see if I can find out what happened.