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In keeping with one of the FASO core manifesto beliefs of "Useful Now is Better than Perfect Later", I've decided to make any FASO customers on my personal mailing list aware that we've quietly released the ArtfulMail product that I've been working on into a very early FASO labs status.

This means you can use it now, but it's a bit of "use at your own risk."  [1]

If you're willing to eat the dogfood with me, maybe we can push the development along a bit quicker.

The problem that ArtfulMail is aiming to solve is this:  html renders VERY differently in email programs than it does in your web browser.  In fact, sending html email is kind of a quagmire.

 One of the issues we see fairly often is people saying, "My email newsletter doesn't look the same in my email as it did in the preview while I was designing it."  That is very frustrating for the artist and it is frustrating for us as well.  Sometimes a design looks great in Gmail but horrible in Outlook.  Sometimes it's the other way around.  Sometimes it works in Hotmail, but not Gmail.  You get the idea. [2]  What we've been working on with ArtfulMail is a set of pre-made, pre-tested templates.  These templates are pre-tested in nearly all major email clients and we "tweak" them until they render as closely the same as possible on every single one of those email programs.  At the moment, we only have six templates, but we anticipate adding more fairly rapidly in 2013.

I will add, due to the holiday schedule and other projects, there won't likely be much addtional work done on ArtfulMail between now and January, but feel free to play with it and you can provide me with any feedback you have, even if we can't act on it immediately.

If you log in to your FASO account and click on the icon on your toolbar that reads "newsletter".  You'll see that in preparation for ArtfulMail, we've launched a cosmetically improved newsletter home screen.  The fuctionality is basically the same as the old screen, we've just cleaned it up a bit and added some stats for your most recently sent newsletters.  Here's a screenshot from my personal account:

Now, if you want to actually enable the new ArtfulMail newsletter composer, you have to do the following from your control panel home screen:

1.  Click the little down arrow in the upper right

2.  Click "Account Settings"

3.  Click "Labs"

4.  Click the checkbox next to "Extreme Early Artful Mail Beta"

5.  Click "Save Changes" (The status next to Extreme Early Artful Mail Beta will turn green and read "ENABLED")

6.  Exit

Now go back to your newsletter home screen and you should see the ArtfulMail logo just like in my screenshot above.  

To try the new composer, click "New Newsletter".  And you will see the following:

If you choose the first option "Start a New Newsletter from a FASO template" you will first see a group of premade templates from which to choose.  (The "blank newsletter" option goes into our old composer screen, and the "replicate" option copies a previous newsletter into a new one).  We currently have six tested templates but as we progress we see pushing this into the dozens and even over a hundred or more.  The idea is to give you templates that will meet most of your needs that have been pre-tested in all major email clients to ensure that they render correctly, which, since all email clients have different rendering engines, is kind of a quagmire as we described at the top of this article.  But that's why we're developing ArtfulMail!  So we can deal with the quagmire and (hopefuly) not you.

Here is what the template selection screen currently looks like (those of you who've been getting my personal newsletters probably will recognize that I've been mostly using the top left template):

After you select a template, you'll be dropped into the ArtfulMail composer where you can edit your subject line, your headline, select images, edit your copy etc.  You also have a pretty nifty spell check that will spell check the whole newsletter as one big document.  Under "Style Settings" you can also change to a different template (for example if you selected a one image template and realize you need two images).  Under style settings you can also change the colors of the newsletter.  (The Style Settings and template switching features are an area that we are still working on and have some pretty big enhancements that are in progress but not ready for release).

Here's a screenshot of me in the ArtfulMail composer working on my recent newsletter about Eddie Van Halen:

If you'd like to give ArtfulMail a try.  I encourage you to enable it from labs and play with it.  Feel free to send me any feedback you have as we will be making a pretty major push to move this product into a more general release sometime in early 2013.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

FASO Founder, Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic

PS - Due to some of the complex javascript we had to use to make this work, the current implementation of the ArtfulMail composer may not work on all versions of Internet Explorer.  It works well on Chrome and Firefox.

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[1] "Use at your own risk" means that there may be issues with this early stage software that we have not discovered yet.  So part of opening the use of it up this early is to ferret out some of those issues.  Another risk is that there is a chance, as we develop and change things, some of the data may have to be purged before the final release.  This will not affect any newsletters you've already sent or any templates we offer, it might affect the ability to replicate an older newsletter with the new "replicate" function.

[2] The reason that html does not render reliably in email programs is that email programs generally use a different rendering engine than web browsers.  So for example, your newsletter might look great in Internet Explorer.  But, unforunately, Microsoft uses the Word rendering engine in Outlook.  And there are tons of differences in the way Word and IE render html.  So what you see in Internet Explorer isn't what you get in Word or Outlook.  Lotus Notes uses something of its own which is particularly different from modern web browsers.  When you use a webmail program like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, the results are generally a little better.  However, those programs have to protect themselves against malicious html injection.  So webmail programs strip out any html they think is "bad".  They might also strip out html that might interfere with the rendering of the email program itself.  Another problem is that people and corporations get behind on the upgrade cycle and run pretty old versions of software that didn't support some html tags.   What all of these different rendering engines mean is that the only way to be sure is to stick to a small, safe subset of html and then to rigorously test each design in every major email program....and different versions of those programs.....and with images blocked and with images enabled.    And that's what we've designed with ArtfulMail.  A consequence of that approach is that once you select one of our designs, you can only change the content, not the design itself.  You can't add html because that might break in ways you can't anticipate without going back and testing in 50+ email programs.  We do allow you to edit the html directly in an advanced area if you really want to, but we won't guarantee the results in that case.