Tips on Creating and Sending Holiday Emails

Here are some tips to make sharing holiday news electronically a little bit easier:

Do you have a long list of email addresses in a distribution list?

If there are too many email addresses in the list, your Internet Service Provider may mark your message as SPAM and refuse to send it.

1. You can create mini-distribution lists to get around this. Unfortunately, it is hard to determine what the upper limit size of your distribution list is before it is marked as SPAM.
2. You can turn to a free email distribution service such as MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com/pricing/free). MailChimp can solve the "large distribution list" problem. MailChimp has a built in SPAM checker. You could also try EmailSPAMCheck (http://www.emailspamtest.com/).

Some general rules to help you avoid your email being identified as SPAM are:

1. Make sure your email has the Subject line filled in.
2. Avoid sales pitch buzz words or phrases such as "free" or "click here" anywhere in your email.

What are the best ways to share photos? 

Adding photos as attachments to an email can trigger another limit imposed by your ISP or your recipient's ISP. Emails have a size limit. How can you avoid the size limitation?

1. Unless you are sending only one or two photos as attachments, forget using attachments in your email.
2. You can share digital photo albums you created by uploading your photos to sites such as Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/  ) or PhotoBucket (http://beta.photobucket.com/ ). Once your photos are uploaded and organized in a photo album, you can share them via a link.

Carl Thorne

Expert Computer Consulting 

voice: 404.229.0839 email: carlthorne@hthcatlanta.com
web: hthcatlanta.com blog: hthcatlanta.blogspot.com