Last August we released an Adobe Air app called Hairball. Hairball allows you to perform complex list segmentation queries offline on your own machine. When you’re done, you can push a static segment containing the results back to your MailChimp account. In depth installation and use discussion for the previous version can be found in the Hairball knowledge-base article and How to Use Hairball guide. Today, we’re happy to announce a second version of that software which is available for download here:

• Mac
• Windows
• Linux

Along with various bug fixes and speed improvements, the new version of Hairball includes some fancy new features that users have been asking for. Specifically, the new features beef up what Hairball can do with campaign-performance data, allowing users to take the first step in interest-based segmentation using historical reader engagement data. Read More

I’ve put my business cards in quite a few fish-bowl drawings, because the amount of personal information I’ll give away for a free chili-cheese burrito is astounding.

At some point, the proprietor of such a card-collecting eatery might pay her angsty nephew to hand jam those email addresses into a spreadsheet. Odds are that one of those addresses is going into that list with a typo. The same thing happens with a single opt-in webform (huzzah for double opt-in).

You might think most of these typo addresses are going to bounce when you send to them, so no big deal—typos are merely a minor annoyance and occasional source of hilariousness. And when they bounce, you’ll just clean them up then.

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