Hotmail are experiencing problems with their servers this afternoon which is causing a backlog of emails waiting to be sent to those addresses.    This problem is at the Hotmail end and is affecting many ISPs and mail providers globally.

Please rest assured that any mail to Hotmail addresses will be queued and delivered once the Hotmail servers are again accepting connections.

Update 18/03/10 16:45 GMT - Hotmail servers are now accepting connections once again and the mail backlog is starting to move.   We should expect delivery to be slightly slower than usual as the Hotmail servers try to catch up, but rest assured your mail will be queued and delivered over the coming hours.

Update 19/03/10 08:17 GMT - Hotmail service is now fully back to normal and all of our queues to Hotmail are clear.   You should see no delays in your email being delivered to these addresses.

You can now have Suite26 training at your office. Call 0845 313 0911 to book your session.

From the comfort and convenience of your own office you can now become an expert in the art of email marketing with Suite26.

Master how to:

• Import your contacts with ease

• Create and send targeted and personalised email campaigns in minutes

• Import your own customised template, logos, links and more to personalise your messages

• Track, follow-up and improve on your campaign performance

• Collect email addresses and build your database from your website

• And much more...

We guarantee you'll be able to create and send HTML emails, track responses and measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns to your customers. See firsthand how easy it is to use Suite26 to expand your business.

Call Ricky or Mark on 0845 313 0911 or email enquiries@26.co.uk to book or find out more about your One-2-One training session.

We are now pleased to announce that the problem we were experiencing yesterday afternoon in generating screenshots of your email campaigns has been resolved.

We're currently experiencing some delays displaying screenshot previews of your email campaigns in the reports area.   We are working with our screenshot provider to try and get this resolved as soon as possible.

When creating your email campaigns you want to do everything you can to ensure that your mail reaches your recipient's inbox.  Whilst most spam filters keep tight lipped about what would cause a message to be marked as spam, Microsoft has released a short guide of things to avoid getting caught in the Outlook junk filter.

You'll find the guide here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010450051033.aspx

Most points there are fairly obvious and would never be used by legitimate mailers, but a couple there may catch people out who use a term in a legitimate way.

The guide is not a complete list and there are many other factors that could still cause your email to get blocked.   It should also be noted that this guide is for the filter built into the Outlook client only.

Here at Suite26 we always advise you to test your email campaigns as much as possible in as many different email clients before sending.   It's easy to register a Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail account and just send a preview message to those accounts, but we would also recommend using an email testing service such as LitmusApp which will test your email in a number of different email clients and against lots of different spam filters.

Not surprisingly, time and spaces are running out rapidly, so please phone and book your Free Suite26 training seminar today to ensure you don't miss out on the email marketing seminar that is going to change how you market and build your business forever.

All spaces for February 3rd, February 10th and February 17th have already gone and February 24th are filling up fast, so don't delay anymore, get your diary out and call us so you don't miss your free Suite26 training seminar.

In case you've forgotten, you get 250 free email credits just for coming along but if you recommend a friend to attend, you get an extra 250 free email credits for your account. That is a total of 500 free credits towards a serious email campaign. Not to mention lunch, meeting us and excellent networking opportunities.

Suite26 is truly the only Online Pay-As-You-Go Email Marketing Application worth its salt, especially for the small business. You'll immediately see how Suite26 lives up to the hype and you won't end up kicking yourself for missing out on this excellent money saving opportunity.

We really believe this jam-packed, interactive seminar will equip you with all you need to use email marketing to grow your business.

These seminars are designed to fit in around your busy schedule so we're providing lunch as well. Call 0845 313 0911 now to book your place, recommend a friend to attend, or to find out more about our seminar programme. Don't wait.

After the huge success of the last training seminars back in September, our in-house training sessions are back by popular demand. So we're inviting all customers to our Harlow offices to attend:

Free Suite26 Training Seminars
Every Wednesday throughout February 2010.

We've put together another jam-packed, interactive seminar, which teaches you everything you need to know to grow your business using email marketing.

It doesn't matter whether you're a complete novice or have some experience of email marketing, as we show you how Suite26 makes it quick and easy to:

• Manage multiple email marketing campaigns
• Create and send professional looking, personalised HTML emails with images and logos
• Import your existing contact lists and create targeted customer groups
• Track and analyse individual customer responses
• Measure and improve on your campaign performance.

Your seminar includes:

• Helpful How-To Guides
• 250 FREE email credits + 250 if you book early
• A Free Lunch

Venue: Unit 2, 6 West Road, Harlow, Essex, CM20 2DU

Dates: Every Wednesday throughout February 2010

Running times: 11am - 2pm

Check out the full range of benefits you get when you attend a Suite26 training seminar.

Call 0845 313 0911 today to book your free place or to find out more about these seminars. Don't delay, book by Friday 8th January and receive 250 FREE extra credits.

Please feel free to invite anyone else you know that is looking to use email marketing to help develop their business.

While you're celebrating this Christmas and New Year we'll be in the background keeping an eye on things as always.

Have a wonderful time and see you on the other side!

If you know of anyone looking for a low-cost, easy-to-use email marketing application, then today could be your lucky day as we've just launched the Suite26 Referral Scheme.

Enjoy cash or email credit rewards

You can earn cash or email credit rewards every time one of your referred customers purchases Suite26 credits.  In essence, the more your referrals spend each month, the bigger the cash or credits reward you receive, and with no limit on the number of referrals you can make, you can potentially earn hundreds of pounds or thousands of credits in rewards every month.

Find out more about the scheme, view the breakdown of what you can earn with very little effort.

What do I do now?

1. Join the Suite26 referral scheme by calling 0845 313 0911 to speak with Ricky or Mark to obtain your unique ID number.
2. Tell your referrals to quote your name or ID number with their first purchase to get the cash or credits rolling into your account.
3. Advise your referrals to quote your unique ID number so they too will earn bonus credits on their first purchase.

Find out how you can start earning your cash or email credits for your business via Suite26 today on 0845 313 0911.

There's an excellent article on the AOL Postmaster blog this morning which discusses the difference between recipients giving permission to receive your mail and actually requesting to receive it.

We all talk about permission based email marketing and how important it is to ensure your mail is delivered reliably to your recipient's inbox, but this article shows that while a recipient may technically have given permission to receive your mail they did not actually request it.

In the example they provide they show that the sender required users to give permission to be on their mailing list before allowing them to carry out a primary function on their website (effectively a forced opt-in) and thus the sender experienced a large number of complaints and delivery problems.

So, here's a few points you should remember:

• Recipients should always request to receive your mailings (for example a sign box on your website or a tickbox shown next to other forms on your site)
• Make sure that potential recipients know what your mailings will be about, how often they should expect to receive them and re-affirm that they can unsubscribe at any time.
• Don't force a recipient to sign up to your mailing list before being able to achieve some task on your site.
• Don't assume that just because somebody has given you their email address that they want to be on your mailing list.   You must always provide a mechanism (ie; tickbox) for them to indicate they want to be on your mailing list.   Adding your entire address book from Outlook is not an option!
• Ensure that recipients can unsubscribe from your mailings with one click and that you honour that unsubscribe from that day forward (Suite26 will do this for you automatically but you must ensure any further back-end databases you may have honours the unsubscribe too)

Finally, the AOL article touches on the topic of engagement.   AOL, among others, keep statistics on how many users click on your mail, how many click to display images, how many click the spam button, how many reply, how many click the not spam button along with other metrics to figure out how engaging your mailings are.   If you regularly get a low engagement score then you could find your mails ending up in the spam folder or maybe not even being delivered at all!   We will be writing more on engagement and the future of deliverability in some upcoming blog posts.

You can read the full article on the AOL blog here: http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/12/03/p/