As described in our v6.7 release, we launched some updates to our video merge tags. For those who don’t know about them, our video merge tags are little snippets of code that look like this:

*| YOUTUBE:[$vid=XXXX] |*

that you insert into your MailChimp campaigns wherever you want to “embed” a video. If you’ve sent email newsletters long enough, you probably learned the hard way that embedding videos will break your HTML emails. To get around this, you have to take a screenshot of the video, open Photoshop, tweak it, insert it back into your campaign, and then hard-code the link. Which is a waste of time. Time you could spend photoshopping cats, or something.

Anyway, since introducing them in 2009, there have always been two complaints about our video merge tags:

1. People wanted more control over the look and feel of them, and

2. People who publish RSS-to-email campaigns wanted to make the tags automagically detect videos in their feeds, then convert them before sending the email.

Done.

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Last week, we had some hardware failures at our US1 data center that affected about 400,000 users (here’s the blog post with all the related updates). Today I want to post an announcement about some upcoming server maintenance that’s related to that outage, plus provide a little followup to what happened.

Planned Downtime: January 22, 1am ET

First, we’re doing some server maintenance at our US1 data center on Sunday, January 22nd at 1am ET (see this in your timezone). The maintenance will require downtime, but should only last a few minutes. During those few minutes, MailChimp will not be available for US1 users at all. Their campaign links will not work, nor will new subscribes be tracked. Again, it should only be a few minutes before everything’s back online. This upgrade will basically help us rebound faster should a similar outage occur again (heaven forbid).

So what exactly happened that day?

To recap, last year we invested in super fast SSD equipped servers to handle our increasing traffic. They helped us handle a TON of load, and sped things up nicely through the holidays. Then on January 2nd, several of those servers just up and died all at once–for no apparent reason at all. It just didn’t make any sense, and we’ve never experienced anything like this before. We admittedly didn’t spend much time investigating the cause, because we were busy taking out those SSDs and replacing them with 15k rpm SAS drives (plus a bunch more RAM).

Then a few days later, we saw this news: 64GB Crucial M4s crashing after 5,000 hours, fix coming

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Here we go again: for this month’s v6.4 release, we’ve got 50 new templates for you.

Here’s the rundown:

• Photography: 11
• Real Estate: 5
• Mobile-friendly: 8
• Holiday / Seasonal: 16
• Halloween (by Creative Media Farm): 10

With Holidays on the horizon, we’ve expanded our offerings for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and we’ll keep on going through November and December.

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Sorry for the late post on this, but we launched v6.4 on Monday. The changes were subtle, but significant:

1. Totally rebuilt our Facebook integration to make it easier
2. Local currency options: Euros and British Pounds
3. New templates for the holidays
4. AlterEgo native iPhone and Android apps

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There’s an extremely cool feature in MailChimp that not a lot of people know about, and we’re trying to change that with some big upgrades:

The Email Beamer
Every list in MailChimp has a private email address. You can send a message to that private address using Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, or even your iPhone or iPad, and we’ll automatically forward it as an email campaign to your list.

This means you can publish MailChimp campaigns while you’re away from your computer, on the road, or sitting in your makeup chair before the show (yep, someone asked us if this was possible).

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