We get lots of questions about placing Flash and other multi-media files into CoolerEmail editions to send to your recipients.

The biggest question tends to be, "Can you put Flash (or other multi-media) into your outgoing CoolerEmail editions?" The off the cuff answer is, "Yes, of course, you can embed Flash in your CoolerEmail editions." And by itself, that answer is true. However, the bigger questions is, "If I put a Flash movie into my outgoing CoolerEmail, will all of my recipients be able to view it?" In that case, the answer is, "Probably not." In a continuing effort to stop spyware, worms, viruses, most email client software will no longer activate the scripts necessary to play these movies. If fact, it would not matter how you sent these rich media files out, the problem is not in sending them out but in having the receiving software read them. If you are willing to have only a small percentage of people you send to be able to view these movies, it may still be worth it for you to include them. However, our recommendation is to put this rich media on a web landing page and direct your recipients to this webpage from your emails.

This edition of CoolerTips was written by Stephen Shore, founder of STADIS.net - A Permission-Based Email Marketing Service.

Hello CoolerEmail Subscriber,

We are very excited to share with you some new developments that make a subscription to CoolerEmail more valuable than ever.

At the recent Authentication and Online Trust Summit, Microsoft unveiled new features in Windows Live Hotmail that provide huge benefits for CoolerEmail senders through the implementation of improved features of our Sender Score Certified program.

Images and links are enabled by default for Sender Score Certified email. Windows Live Hotmail has joined an increasing number of ISPs and is suppressing images and disabling links in email unless a user specifies otherwise. However, CoolerEmail subscribers using Sender Score Certified email will not be impacted by this change. Email sent from active, certified CoolerEmail accounts with Sender Score Certified will have images and links enabled by default. Consequently, your emails will appear to your recipients the way you expect them to appear.

CoolerEmail sent with Sender Score Certified "on" will have more lenient daily throttling limits. Windows Live Hotmail now monitors IP traffic and enforces both an hourly and a daily throttling limit. This means if Hotmail thinks you are sending too many emails to their users in a specific period, they will just start refusing to accept them, i.e. they will bounce them. However, CoolerEmail's Sender Score Certified emails will not be subjected to hourly throttling limits at all, and are being provided with more lenient daily throttling limits. This means that all of your emails will be delivered and your bounce rate will be lower.

CoolerEmail's Sender Score Certified email will include an unsubscribe button in the Windows Live Hotmail interface. Have you ever found that some of your recipients, instead of just unsubscribing from your list, report you as a spammer? This is because many web email services have a button that makes it very easy for recipients to click that button and report you as a spammer….even though we both know that you are not a spammer. It is just easier for them to report you as a spammer than to unsubscribe. Marketers have long been advocating for an ISP "unsubscribe" button - either instead of or in addition to the "report spam" button to give subscribers the opportunity to opt out of the mailing rather than complain about it. Microsoft is one of the first to add this function, and it is displayed by default when mail is sent from CoolerEmail's Sender Score Certified service.

We have every reason to believe that this functionality will soon be adopted by other Internet email providers. As this happens, your CoolerEmail subscription will become even more significant in helping you to improve the delivery of emails to your mailing lists.

You don't need to do anything to take advantage of these new benefits - they are automatically included in a CoolerEmail subscription at no additional charge to you.

We typically remind our customers to send a single email to themselves before sending their blast out, whether it is going out to 100 people or 100 thousand.

We remind our customers how easy it is to make an unintentional typo error that can usually be caught when looking at the real, received email.

But that is really just the beginning. One of the problems out in the real world is that not everyone is using the same program to read their email. There are literally dozens of different ways that people now read their emails. Originally most people used programs on their computers like Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, Novell's GroupWare, Apple's Mail, or Lotus Notes. Then along came all of the Internet email suppliers who let you read your email with your browser, like AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Juno, and now Google. And that is only the beginning...after all, each of these could be read with any of several different browsers, like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, Opera, or Apple's Safari. What makes matters worse and you may not realize is that each of these actually displays (or renders) your emails differently.

Then throw into the mix that not all of these different ways of reading your emails may be delivering those great looking graphics you spent so much time developing. Many of these programs or services block all graphics by default as a safety precaution against viruses and spyware. And even though with some of these options it is possible to change the default settings and let graphics through, how many people do you think go in and change the default settings...or even know that they can be changed.

CoolerEmail can help you with some of the possible problems. Our standard templates are set up to be as universally applicable as possible. However, the best defense is to know how your emails really look when they are received. To do this you'll have to look at them yourself as they are received by various methods. We suggest that if your list is of any appreciable size, that you do some testing to see what your recipients are seeing. If you have one email program, like Microsoft Outlook, than you might want to invest in a couple more, like Eudora and Apple Mail. Also, most of the large email services now offer free accounts to anyone who wants them. So go ahead, sign up for accounts at Yahoo, Google mail, Hotmail, AOL, and Juno. Also, if you think that all browsers render web pages and email just like Microsoft Internet Explorer, well, even MSIE doesn't render just like MSIE. As its versions have changed, the way it displays email has changed. And think about at least downloading and installing Firefox. Firefox can be downloaded for free at www.mozilla.com.

We are not dictating which email program and browser you should be using in your everyday work. We are suggesting that you have all of them available on your computer for looking at what they do to your emails. When you know what is happening to your emails, you'll have a much better idea of what you'll need to do to insure that they always look the same.

CoolerEmail has at least one way to make your testing with multiple email clients a bit easier. At the bottom right corner of your My Account page is now an input field for "Test List Email Accounts". You can enter the email addresses that you would like to send to for testing, each one separated by a coma. Then when you go to the Send page, you will notice that there is one more, new option on the Send page. You will now be able to "Send edition to test list". No longer will you have to create a list along with other lists for testing that would then require moving a copy of the edition into the correct list. This Test List will work from within any list.

Use this test list on a regular basis and see what your mails will look like. Sometimes making small changes can make your email more universally viewable. In future CoolerTips we'll spell out in detail some of the things you should and should not do to make sure your emails look good to all of your recipients.