Starting on March 23rd Lycos began to roll out a new email client.
The new front end is powered by Zimbra, an open source collaboration
suite.
The roll-out of the new email client is happening in stages and is
still ongoing as of the 25th of March. In addition to changing the email
client changes were made to the imap servers. The old imap server
address was imap.mail.lycos.com to imap.lycos.com. People accessing mail
via imap should update the imap service to continue to receive it in
their mail client of choice.
Zimbra's new client includes a preview pane which is new addition to
the mailbox; the overall feel and look of Zimbra's mail client is not
unlike that of an Outlook Web Access client. The default reading pane is
positioned below the mailbox list view just like the default preview
pane of Outlook 2003. The following screenshots show you a before and
after:
Old Lycos email client
New Lycos email client
CSS & design Support in Lycos
The new email client appears to have limited support for CSS.
Background images defined through CSS are not supported and will not
render as an in-line style, however background colors defined as in-line
styles will work. Font manipulation and inheritance is supported via
in-line style. The overall result of the new client's rendering is not
unlike Gmail's with similar support for CSS. Because Gmail does not
support style sheets (either in the head or anywhere else in the body)
designers should instead rely on in-line styles as the lowest common
denominator when designing emails.
The addition of a preview pane is an added boon for marketers as it
gives their emails a better chance of being noticed. However, the new
email client, preview pane included, has images disabled by default so
although the message might get someone's attention it still takes a
recipient's click in order to enable images and thereby register as an
open.
Cheers!
-Len Shneyder Director of Deliverability & Messaging Unica | Pivotal Veracity
Back in September of this year AOL began hosting the mailboxes for Mail.com; the transition began by changing the MX servers and how mail was being routed to mail.com users. For a stint of time one would have to be whitelisted at both AOL and Mail.com (formerly under the umbrella of Outblaze). The MXs have been finalized and all mail bound for Mail.com is safely under the umbrella of AOL.
This weekend a new round of changes took place: the rebranding of the Mail.com webmail client. The new client looks very much like AOL's webmail client and behaves accordingly.
In addition to the visible changes that took place, Mail.com's imap/pop preferences also changed. Although the site listed smtp.mail.com as the usable server, mail would not download via this host. From some testing we did, it appears that changing the pop/imap host from Mail.com's to AOL's will restore normal mail delivery.
Cheers!
-Len Shneyder Director of Partner Relations & Industry Communications www.pivotalveracity.com
We have a custom blog design to make our site a bit easier on the eyes and would love your feedback on how we can continue make it better in the future.
Please take a look and let us know what you think! I know the email signup form is broken right now, but if you find any other problems please add them in the comments below.
So this was bound to happen with a web email provider and I am glad to see it. Just like in many email clients that you have on your computer these days (Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, etc) you can now better manage the copious amounts of different inbound information that comes to you (Email, RSS, Blog alerts, etc)
Yahoo! mail now features a "Smarter Inbox" that gives higher priority display of email customers care most about or receive most regularly like from friends and colleagues. The smarter inbox lets you filter these more important emails right on the welcome page for mail.
They are also tying in the idea of social media management into this launch. So instead of your Inbox being full of not only emails, RSS feeds, social media updates, and spam... you can now more effectively manage these sources separately. GIves you the ability to make priority on what you want in your face when you login. Part of this reminds me of how GMAIL allows you to mange long threads of email discussions.
There is a video example of this new idea here
"We're creating a better, more relevant user experience," said Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo's audience products division. "And we're opening up Yahoo more for third parties to leverage." So this means that Facebook and others can write code or plug-ins to allow user to manage all their communications from one place. Wouldn't be surprised to see Goodmail or Return Path create a plug-in to facilitate delivery of accredited email.
Again, I love this idea in this era of information overload, but it will take a bit of time for people to understand all of this change going on. Heck, we are just now getting the idea of RSS into the consumers hands.
Thank you to Dennis Dayman, J.D. Falk, Laura Atkins, Stephanie Miller, Neil Schwartzman, Matt Verhout, Loren McDonald, DJ Waldow, Krzysztof Jarecki, Nicolas Toper and everyone who has commented on a post!
We're still looking for additional contributors to this blog. There are so many great deliverability professionals out there with different experiences and perspectives to share that it would be shame if we limited this to just a few!
Even if you can't become a contributor, we encourage you to comment on individual posts and share your thoughts with the rest of the community.
I just added two new sidebar items to the site. "Other Blogs - Past 24 hours" lists the most recent postings from deliverability-related blogs around the web and "Other Blogs - Most Popular" lists the deliverability-related postings from the past 6 months that are linked to the most by other blogs. These feeds are provided by OneSpot.
The old site was getting a bit stale so over the next few weeks we'll be updating it to join the Web 2.0 world. The home page will be a blog featuring the best deliverability minds in the industry, along with wiki's about each ISP, whitelist, blacklist, etc. We have a calendar of upcoming industry events and forums for posting questions, tips or jobs.
If you'd like to be a contributor to the site, please contact Joshua Baer.
