So this Gmail quirk had me baffled for a while, mostly because I had never run across it before.

If you have two rows of a table in which all the cells contain images Gmail likes to insert a horizontal line between the rows. Weird.

The fix is pretty quick and painless. Just set the display for the images to ‘block’. You can do it in the head of the document:

img {display: block;}

Or you could do it inline on each image:

<img src="images/example.jpg" style="display:block;">

One of the biggest challenges that you face as an e-mail marketer is keeping lists clean and tidy. An area that we frequent find clients overlooking are soft bounces of the ‘Mailbox Full’ type. These are bounces that came back because the mail server couldn’t cram one more byte into the subscriber’s over-stuffed mailbox.

They have no place in your list. These represent subscribers that have moved on, not just from your newsletters but from that e-mail address all together.

What’s worse is that eventually the ISPs holding those abandoned e-mail addresses are going to deactivate them or hold onto them as spam traps. Continuing to message these addresses after this point is going to negatively impact your sending reputation.

So, ReachMail makes it quick and easy to scrub those records out of your lists. Simply head on over to the Contacts and Lists tab and select the List Sweeper function on any list. In the function select the option to deactivate the Mailbox Full soft bounces and click the Run List Sweeper button. Voila! Your bounces are deactivated.

Are you a Thunderbird user? Ever get this message:

Ever wonder what it’s all about?

Here’s the deal. Thunder bird tosses this warning when the display text of your link is a full URL and it differs from the href attribute of the link (the actual pointer of the link). For example:

Your link says this: Go to http://www.acmecompany.com to learn more.

But your code says this: <a href=”http://www.companyx.com”>

So Thunderbird assumes that the mail is therefore an attempt to direct users to a malicious web site.

So, the issue is that if you use link tracking in your mails and the display text is also a complete URL Thunderbird will incorrectly label you as a scammer. Lame.

There’s a simple work-around though, just don’t use a complete URL in the text of the link. Even just removing the protocol (http://) is sufficient to avoid the scam warning.

So the text of your link might become: Go to our web site to learn more. or Go to www.acmecompany.com to learn more.

Problem solved.