*| 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.

Customizing Video Merge Tags

In the past, whenever we generated the thumbnail of your video, we added a border. In many cases, we also added the video’s star ratings, number of likes, number of views, and other “flair.” Now, you can take all that away and leave it barebones. Here’s an example:

On the left is how this Youtube video is embedded into your MailChimp campaigns by default. On the right is how it looks when we customize the video merge tag like this:

* |YOUTUBE:[$vid=XXX, $max_width=250, $title=N, $border=N, $trim_border=N, $ratings=N, $views=N]| *

You can tweak Wistia, Vzaar, Blip and Vimeo movies as well. Here’s the full documentation for that.

Automatically Converting Videos

These merge tags are cool, but where they really come in handy is in your RSS-to-email campaigns. For example, you can subscribe to receive daily emails from the MailChimp blog (ahem, signup form over in the right column). Our system checks my RSS feed every morning at 10am (that’s when I decided to schedule them) and if it finds new content, it pulls it into a MailChimp campaign. From time to time, I embed videos in my blog posts. I knew those videos would break when they got emailed, but I wasn’t about to modify the way I blog so that the email would work better. On the blog, the blog experience is what matters most.

Anyway, now I can just set my RSS-to-email campaign so that any embedded video it detects will be automatically converted into a video merge tag.

1. Open RSS-to-email campaign

First, I open the smart folder that shows all my RSS-to-email campaigns:

2. Pause campaign to edit

Next, click on “MailChimp Blog Updates” and then I get a list of all the recent blog updates that have been sent. The top one is the “source file” I need to modify:

3. Activate video conversion

Go to step 3 of the campaign builder:

and you’ll see all the different campaign setup and tracking options. In the lower right of the screen, look for “Content Controls” and check the box to autoconvert videos:

Hey, if you’re tinkering around with your RSS campaigns, this might be a good time to tweak your delivery time. Ages ago, when we launched RSS-to-email, we didn’t have the ability to pick a time or frequency. We’ve since added more control, so you might want to go to Step 1 and take a look at the options:

4. Save and re-activate the RSS campaign

Now that the video control option is set, click “Save & Exit” and you’ll be prompted to re-activate the RSS campaign:

Moving forward, any embedded videos we detect in your campaigns will be automatically converted to an email-safe format.

By the way, this automatic video conversion option works on regular MailChimp campaigns, too.

Related, IMHO:

• Build Your Own Content Digest With MailChimp – a tutorial we found by Jesse Rand
• We’ve launched tons of new email templates in recent months, many of which would be perfect for RSS-to-email campaigns. Check them out in the template gallery.
• If you’re a blogger, you probably have some VIPs on your list whose engagement you monitor closely. Our Golden Monkeys app can help with that. Get a push notification to your smartphone if/when a special someone opens your campaigns. Every time my blog post gets sent, my VIPs open and monkeys start screaming from my pocket. No better validation for writers than screaming monkeys.
• Other MailChimp features we think bloggers might like
• I’m often asked (usually by bloggers) for tools that can connect them to similar bloggers out there, so that they can promote each other and help each other grow their lists. Here ya go: Introducing Wavelength

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

Those were the exact drives our data center used, and 5,000 hours is how old they were. We can’t say with 100% certainty that was the cause, but we can say there were other drives at US1 that didn’t fail, and they were different models (if we were the cause, you’d think all the drives would fail). And as stated above, we’re making some changes that should make events like this faster to recover from.

Some people have asked us, “So does this mean you don’t keep frequent backups?”  And from our close friends who know better, “Ha, guess you guys don’t know much about redundancy?”

To shed some light on the insanity of the situation, 76 hard drives died in 6 hrs. Fortunately, since we separate our users across 3 different data centers, the majority of them had no idea anything was even wrong.

For anybody who’s curious, there’s also this comment from Joe, one of our DevOps Engineers:

I thought I would briefly mention how we set things up though as we take these sorts of downtime and data loss events very seriously and I don’t want people to think this was a simple “a machine died, we restored from backups” scenario.

Each user shard in US1 is supported by 3 separate machines. Each of these machines is powerful enough to easily support the entire user shard on its own but only one of these is active at any given time. The other two sit mostly idle staying in sync and ready to take over in the event of a failure. We essentially are always running up to the second backups to two different machines for each user shard. In addition to all of this, we run full backups on every shard every day for “disaster” scenarios.

We very, very rarely lose an entire machine and when we do users do not notice because one of the backup machines is activated automatically and takes over.

In this case the nature of the hardware failure was so severe and so catastrophic that it impacted ALL of our machines – causing them to crash and corrupting their entire raid arrays of SSDs as they went down. We were unable to pull the current data off these machines for all shards before they were fully offline and despite spending many, many hours trying to recover the data after the crashes we failed except for that one clump of users that didn’t have any data loss.

Hope that sheds some light on our process. This was a truly unique event that I hope never happens again. We are making changes now to fortify our shards against data loss even further.

Customer feedback from the outage

I wanted to share something else with you. After the outage, we sent an email apology out to 788 users who were affected the most severely by the outage.

Here’s an archive of the email we sent.

I asked those customers to reply and send me any feedback they wanted. I totally expected to be screamed at and threatened for the next few weeks.

Instead, all I got was positive energy. People told me they loved us anyway, that my health was all that mattered, I’m a good human, etc. Here’s a sample of the replies I’ve received so far:

—-

So I am writing to thank you for you attention to this situation! I still LOVE Mail Chimp.. no worries… It was frustrating to reconstruct my campaign and to resend to my list… but I did it and all is well. Luckily, I had sent the campaign and could reconstruct it from the one I sent to myself.

—-

Ben, I’m so bummed. ARGH. Oh, that totally sucks. I thought that I had only lost a mini add-on campaign to one I had done earlier, but I just discovered this evening that it was the whole kit and caboodle campaign. SHEESH! The good news is that I’ve gotten some email replies from the campaign it looks like it got sent, but I have no way to know that for sure, who opened it, who doesn’t want to get email from me anymore, etc. as it doesn’t show up as a sent campaign on my dashboard.

Flippin’ firecrackers, I’m disappointed! I kinda want to throw a banana at you. BUT you’ve got such an amazingly fantastic, user-obsessed, FREE product, it’s hard to be mad at you.
How can you win back my confidence…? I would really love to know the stats for the campaign I sent out. I would like people from that to unsubscribe without sending me an email. Since those things are probably impossible, there’s not much else I can ask of you. You made a mistake, you totally owned it and are doing everything in your power to make it better. I was a Mailchimp evangelist before this, but I daresay this little f-up and your response to it might have just elevated my opinion of Mailchimp even higher.

Thanks for doing and being your best.

—-

Ben, thanks for your lovely email! I really feel you guys care about what you’re doing
Anyway, it’s no biggie. Thanks for letting me know.

—-

Hi Ben,
I don’t need any kind of compensation. This apology is more than enough for me.
Thank you!

—-

Dear Mr Chestnut,

Greetings from the Czech Republic and I hope you are doing well!

I am regret to hear about your hardware failures that have an impact on us. We have a good experiences with Mailchimp and it is clear to me that these things could happen. Due to the effort, the discount for the next month would be much appreciated! Kindly please let me know if it would be possible.

I am truly looking forward to hearing from you and wish you and your family all the best for a healthy and Prosperous New Year.

—-

Hello, thank you so much for all the explanations. As you say, we couldn’t send our campaign yesterday, but there is no problem with that. We’ve been using your service without any problem until now, so thank you for that and don’t worry about your hardware failure. These things sometimes happen.

—-

Although I lost my campaign and as a result need to send it again because of this failure,
Your truly honest mail and apology is something rare in the business world, and for that you have my full confidence in your service,
and much more important, in your credibility as a human being that doesn’t afraid to admit he made a mistake.

So, Thank you for this wonderful service of yours,
and apology accepted!

—-

I just wanted to say that you guys are awesome. Mailchimp customer service is SO top notch every single time. What a perfect “I’m sorry” email  

Love y’all, and no worries on the campaign. I’ll just shoot out another one. 

—-

I just got you email – as a free user I am ok with having a simple outage in fact all I lost was the report for a campaign I sent out on the morning of “the incident”. And as much as I enjoy seeing which of the 46 magicians read our email reminder – I’m sure the world isn’t going to end.  I say all that to say I appreciate your integrity and willingness to go the extra mile – it makes me confident that if my website ever gets off the ground – I’ll use mailchimp as my email service – thanks for being AWESOME.

—-

That is ok, Nobody can controle the lectronic world….if your healthy..that is all that count

—-

Hey Ben,

No biggie, it was just one of those automated RSS campaigns. This isn’t my paid account which I use for another project so I appreciate the awesome free level of service you continue to provide. You guys do a great job keeping me informed and providing a reliable, easy to use service with helpful support staff. Keep it up.

—-

Hi Ben,

Thank you for your message, I appreciate your concerns. At this point I am only doing testing so nothing of any significance was lost. This is my first attempt creating an RSS campaign and I must say I am quite impressed. I think MailChimp is great.

—-

Thanks for owning up to the problem. Ironic that it happened on the first business day of the year.  

Mailchimp is a great service. Thanks.

—–

Glad to here all sorted guys. Would prefer a t shirt via they are way cool.

—–

I’m devoted to MailChimp in the same way I’m devoted to Apple, Gmail, WordPress and Saddleback Leather. You’re a brand head-and-shoulders above the rest. When I was unable to access my account yesterday, it was disappointing, but had you not sent this email I’d have thought nothing of it. MailChimp had never disappointed me before, so one day without access or autoresponders hardly bothered me.

I appreciate the gesture, though. Keep up the excellent work, Ben. My businesses couldn’t run without you guys. Hopefully soon I’ll have enough subscribers to use the $50 credit on the premium service. (Although, a free lifetime account would have been an awesome way to “make things right” )

—-

Dear Ben,

Thank you for informing me so openly – i really appreciate it.

You are doing a great job and i am very grateful for your services.

My campaign link was broken, but no problem!

Many thanks for your support.

—-

Crap happens. You’all are still my favorite chimps. Thanks for the heads up.

—-

It happens. Don’t worry. I have full confidence in mailchimp. My campaign went and that’s all that matters. I don’t need a record.

Thank you for the explanation.

—-

Thanks for the email but really it seems that my email went out just fine. I got a copy in my inbox and everything looks Okay to me. We are still loving MailChimp!

—-

There were a couple not-so-happy ones too (and well-deserved) but the overwhelming majority of replies were very positive. I love our customers.

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.

For October, we’ve added a number of Halloween-related templates. Some of them come from our in-house designers,

but the majority come from our talented friends (and MailChimp experts) at Creative Media Farm, in A Coruña, Spain:

Add these up with our existing Halloween templates, and I think we’ve got most of the paranormal bestiary covered.

It’s not just Halloween we’ve added; there’s also a smattering of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, and fall- and winter-themed templates. There are even a couple of templates specifically made for that most riotous of days, Black Friday.

Perhaps you don’t want to send anything holiday related. Maybe you, like me, see all of this Christmas Creep and you despair. Worry not. I’ve got some interesting stuff for you as well, like the new ‘Photography’ templates:

These templates are built for one thing: displaying an array of images. Text is very secondary, and generally reserved for captions and short descriptions. If it’s visually appealing, and you want to show it off, these templates are for you. In fact, you could even use them alongside our new Real Estate templates:

Rounding out the additions for this month are what we’re calling “Mobile-friendly” templates. These templates are built to a 320px width, and are limited to single-column layouts, both properties well-suited to mobile screens:

These templates come at a time when mobile email readership is booming, but they’re just one way to send to mobile devices. We’re working on adding support for media queries, so those of you who are handy with HTML and CSS will have the option of adding mobile-specific styling to your templates. We’re still researching and experimenting, but I’ll blog more about media queries once our support for the feature is finalized and implemented.

Next month’s collection of templates is already in the pipe. We’ll have more templates from Creative Media Farm, along with some of our own design.

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

New Facebook integration

After listening to user feedback on our previous Facebook integration and performing some usability research, we came to the scientific conclusion that it pretty much sucked. For some people, it worked brilliantly. For others, it was a complete p.i.t.a. So we totally rebuilt it.

Setup is much easier, and you can more intuitively specify the Facebook page you want to manage, what list you want to sync with, and customize your tab label and overall look and feel. Here’s a screenshot:

Payment in EURO and GBP

Our internationalization efforts continue. Over the last few months we’ve been prepping our banking and billing infrastructure to handle local currencies, so that our customers around the world don’t have to pay in USD. The road ahead is still long, but we’ve started taking our first few steps:

More currency options will be added soon. We’re also well on our way to translating the MailChimp app. We anticipate launching MailChimp in different languages starting early 2012 (we’re trying not to make too many major changes to the app during the insane holiday season).

New email templates for the holidays

Fabio, our resident email-jitsu-5th-degree-black-belt-in-templates master, will post a more detailed update on this (as usual), but we’ve again added a bunch more templates in this release. When you create a new campaign and choose your template, go to predesigned–>holiday and you’ll find a bunch of new options to choose from. I just like watching the fake companies and logos that our design team keeps coming up with, like Chuck’s Tree Hut:

AlterEgo for iPhone and Android

When we first launched AlterEgo (our free 2-factor authentication security service for MailChimp) earlier this year, it was only available as a web app that you accessed in your smartphone’s browser. This week, we launched native iPhone and Android apps to make the experience super fast and snappy. Plus, it’s got cool sword sound effects. Details on this blog post.

We have one more release planned for November, but it will be extremely “lite” as the holiday season has officially begun in email service provider land (seriously, there are Black Friday campaigns getting spooled up already). So most of our efforts from now until January will be on adding servers and resources to keep MailChimp stable and speedy, as opposed to new functionality. Our focus will also be shifted over the next few months to our other apps (some of them listed here), more new templates, and new mobile apps. We will resume normal disruptive email innovation in January 2012.

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).

In the past, this feature only allowed you to “beam” emails into MailChimp as drafts. You then had to sign in and hit “Send” from within MailChimp. Also, once your draft was beamed into MailChimp, it was a little difficult to tweak (unless you could code HTML).

In v6.3 of MailChimp, we changed all that.

Now, when you send an email to your list’s private email address, we’ll send back a confirmation email that looks like this:

All you have to do is reply with the word “send” in your message…

…and we’ll deliver your campaign to that list. You never have to log in to MailChimp to do anything.

But if you want to log in to check the campaign, or if you wanted to beam a rough draft into MailChimp then tweak it later, you’ll find it saved as a draft in your MailChimp account:

Click “edit” and you can modify the campaign with MailChimp’s built-in visual editor:

Using MailChimp’s Email Beamer

There’s really not that much to using the beamer. If you can send an email, you can use the beamer. The work is in the setup process.

Setting up

First, find your private email address.

1. Sign in to MailChimp, and click the Lists tab.

2. You’ll see links for “Email Beamer.”

3. Click to get the Beamer address for the list you want:

On the next screen, you can grab the list’s private email address:

You can either copy-paste this into your address book, or click the handy vCard link to download it to your address book.

Tip: When you add your Beamer email to your address book, be sure you give it a nice description so that you can easily recall it or autofill it whenever you’re ready to send:

Send some tests!

You don’t want to be getting acquainted with this feature when you actually need to use it. Practice with it a little first.

1. Setup a test list, with just a few of your test email addresses, or some friends or co-workers
2. Grab that test list’s Beamer address, and add it to your address book (follow the steps above)
3. Beam some campaigns. Attach images, or drag and drop them into your email app. See what happens in MailChimp when you use Outlook vs. Gmail vs. your smart phone.
4. Use the Inbox Inspector to test any complex templates you’re beaming into MailChimp. Some HTML email templates that you beam will work great. Others, maybe not so much.

Try composing an email on your smart phone that includes photos, and beam it to MailChimp:

You’ll notice that we don’t do much to change the email, other than adding a footer with all the spam-law-required stuff (unsub link, mailing address, etc).

Verify your domains

For security purposes, we can’t accept a beamed campaign from just any email address. You’ll need to send us campaigns where the reply-to is from a verified domain (learn more about Verified Domains and see how to check yours in MailChimp). We’ll only send the confirmation message to your account’s verified email address. So let’s say you’ve set up an account for “Acme Bananas” and you want to let your Marketing Manager beam campaigns into MailChimp from her Gmail. That’s fine, so long as she uses a reply-to from ____@acmebananas.com. But she’ll need to be able to get the confirmation messages that we send back to “____@acmebananas.com”

A note on attachments

Some email apps, like Gmail, don’t let you drag and drop inline images into your content. Instead, you have to attach your images to the bottom of the message:

When this is beamed to MailChimp, we’ll display attachments below your content:

So do some testing from the email app(s) you plan to use, so that you’re familiar with how Beamer will translate your emails.

One interesting note is that all images from beamed campaigns get stored in your MailChimp account’s image gallery for future use. Which, if you think about it, is kind of an interesting way to quickly beam images straight into your gallery. Hmm.

Perfect for Travelers, Noobs, and Hot Tubs

The Email Beamer is great if you’ve got a client or co-worker who wants to use MailChimp, but hasn’t got the time or inclination to sign in and learn our app (ba-humbug!). Or maybe it’s someone who is always on the go, and prefers to use Gmail to compose their newsletters. Maybe there’s someone in your organization that needs to send simple letters out to your email list, but you don’t exactly want them inside MailChimp and tweaking your settings and stuff.

Set them up with their Email Beamer private email address, and bam — they can send from whatever and wherever they want.

Yep, you could even send words of wisdom to subscribers with your Blackberry while taking a hot bubble bath:

Loosely Related:

• Got ba-humbug users in your company that would like Email Beamer? They’d probably like our co-branding features too
• Aaaand they’d probably be good candidates for our sharable VIP reports too.
• Email Beamer’s great for occasional mobile campaigns, or for some users who need simplicity. But if simplicity is all you want, try TinyLetter instead of MailChimp (it’s free, and it’s ultra-simple and easy)
• If you’re the always-on-the-go type, check out MailChimp’s various mobile apps

Click that tab, and you’ll see that we’ve broken down each opt-in step so that you can translate every string of text that we use. In my example below, I’m customizing for Spanish-Mexico (as opposed to Spanish-Spain):

Just a little example for me and you.

See also:

• MailChimp Announces Expanded International Reach
• New Videos and Foreign Language Recordings (MailChimp Webinar)
• Taking MailChimp International
• High Quality Human Translations Available Automatically in MailChimp

Here’s what we’ve got for you:

• Newsletter: 12
• Non-profit: 9

While we’ve added another healthy batch of general-use newsletter templates, I think the big blip on the radar here is the expansion of our non-profit category, with easier-to-use, more stable templates.

You’ll find 3 different designs with 3 variations each, but they’ve all got one focus: getting the word out about your cause, and compelling others to help. To that end, each design features prominent donation buttons and social sharing toolbars. Depending on what your message is, you can either be dramatic in style…

…or you can serve up a more muted tone:

Or you can ignore the designs altogether and use your own style; as always, the templates are fully customizable.

That customization is handy, but sometimes you just need to send out content without playing the part of graphic designer. That’s why we continue to expand the ‘Newsletter’ category with a variety of different template options. Need to send a quick note to your subscribers, and want to stay classy? You can use this elegant template:

Maybe you want to send something a little more attention-grabbing in addition to your usual content, like a coupon. We’ve got you covered:

Combined with last month’s batch of 42 templates, and the month prior’s 33 templates, this month’s 21 templates bring us to a nice 3-month total of 95 new email templates. Not too shabby.

We’re already working on next month’s batch, with more non-profit templates, templates tailored for photographers, some that’ll work well for real estate listings, some new Halloween and fall-themed templates, and more coming down the pipe. Keep an eye out.

These new standards, often referred to as HTML5, are indeed the future of the web. They provide new markup and rules that specify how browsers should store data, play media files and present content. All of these changes promise to help make the old, static HTML of yesteryear more friendly for living, breathing web applications (like MailChimp) that we’ve been building for the web.

That all might sound like rainbows and unicorns, but some things are were much easier to do in Flash. Building an animated, data-driven charting library was one of those things. In fact, up until this week’s release, most of the pie, line and bar charts seen in the MailChimp application were displayed in Flash using the versatile amCharts library.

Earlier this year, amCharts released an entirely new JavaScript/HTML5 library that offered much of the same functionality without the need for Flash. The UX Team set up a little demo, duplicating a couple of our existing Flash charts with the new Javascript/HTML5 library. When Ben saw that they even animated in, his response echoed our own sentiments, “Boingy, iPhone friendly charts. Hallelujah!“

In the v6.3 release, we only replaced the List Growth chart that shows up on the list dashboard and the Performance Overview chart on the main Reports page. Here’s what the List Growth chart looked like before:

…and after:

As you can see, aside from making them a little taller, we were mainly trying to replicate the old charts. You might have noticed those checkboxes next to the legend items though. Checking and unchecking these boxes actually redraws the chart with the selected data. Also, if you click and drag to the left or right, you can zoom in on a set of columns:

So, if you wanted to see just the new subscribers from December to June in the chart above, you can do that:

Since the new charts are customizable with JavaScript, we can do lots of fun, interactive tricks like this. Also, since they’re generated as SVG, they scale as you resize the browser window and print exactly as they appear on the page.

Assuming all goes well with these new HTML5 charts, we’ll be replacing the rest of the old Flash charts in the application over the coming weeks. It’s just a tiny change for the desktop experience, but a giant (boingy) leap forward for mobile. Hallelujah!

Some really cool updates to announce, plus one big policy change…

• Custom language translations for the entire opt-in process: In 2009, we launched human translated versions of our sign-up process in a few dozen languages. Naturally, the translations weren’t perfect for everybody. So we’ve opened up the forms so that you can translate them manually. Every single step is now fully customizable so you can get things just the way you want.
• Send campaigns from mobile devices (or from any email app) with Email Beamer, a private email address that we provide w/every MailChimp list. We just made it so that you don’t have to sign in to MailChimp to complete the delivery process (simply reply to a confirmation email we send you) and we made it easier to tweak your beamed campaign inside MailChimp. Yay! Build your emails in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, or on your iPad, then beam them to your MailChimp list!
• Verified Domains: In the past, you could send an email campaign and use any reply-to address you wanted. This was handy for agencies sending emails on behalf of multiple clients. Unfortunately, it’s also handy for spammers who want to send phishing scams. So if you try to send a campaign using a reply-to address that’s not your domain name, we’ll require that you verify access to that domain by sending you a confirmation email.
• Slightly Less Automatic Mobile Formatting: Waaaaay back in 2008, we launched a pretty cool feature that detected when your readers were visiting your campaign archive from a mobile device, and we automatically re-formatted your email to be more mobile browser friendly. Over the past couple years though, more and more people have started using smart phones with big screens and proper web page rendering that don’t need any of this auto-formatting. So from now on, when a mobile user visits your campaign archive, we’ll provide a link that gives them the option to “view mobile version.”
• Reports enhancements: We’ve made a few enhancements to reports, such as the ability to drill down and see more detailed list growth stats, and making them more iPad friendly.
• Maximum Send Limits for High Volume Senders: We’ve changed our maximum send limit for MailChimp lists that are greater than 50k members from 8 times per month to 6 times per month. Not a ton of people actually send this often, but among the ones who do, we’ve found too many users setting up lots and lots of accounts and abusing the process. We realize saving money is their goal, but making money is sort of our goal, so this is a way to meet in the middle. Current accounts (before 9/12/2011) will be “grandfathered” with the 8X limit, but the new 6X policy will be put into effect on all new accounts going forward.

So we created Hairball. It’s an Air app that you install on your computer, and it syncs with your MailChimp list. Then, you can GO NUTS building all kinds of segments with your list. When you’re done, you sync it back up to MailChimp.

Hairball is currently in beta. If you’re interested in giving it a try, here’s where you can download:

• Mac: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.air
• Windows: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.exe
• Linux: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/hairball/Hairball.linux.air

Some Quick Tips

1. First, go to “Connect Account” (it’s the link in the top right of the screen) and tell it which MailChimp account to connect to:

2. Next, you’ll see all your MailChimp Lists:

3. For each list, you’ll need to click the “fetch” buttons to sync their data down. Depending on the size of your lists, downloading their data can take a while (now you know how our servers feel).

4. After the data is downloaded, you can build unlimited segments. Get whacky!

You can even build a segment that’s based on fields with empty data:

5. After you’ve saved your segment, upload it to MailChimp:

6. You can even generate random percentage segments (what’s more random than 17?):

7. You can view the members of your segments in Hairball, or export them for a spreadsheet app or something:

Static Segments 

After building your segments in Hairball, they’re uploaded to MailChimp as “static segments.” That means we don’t have to build them dynamically for you, because you already did the hard work in Hairball (which makes our database servers purr  happily).

Whenever you log in to MailChimp and create your next campaign, you’ll see an option in the segmentation screen for static segment:

That’ll show the segments you built in Hairball. Pick your segment, and it’ll zap into place and you’re on your way. Power tip: use this to build a big static segment of “proof readers” that can test all your campaigns before you send to the full list.

If you’re one of our users with ginormous lists and MailChimp just feels a little sluggish when you build out your segments, give Hairball a try. Post your comments below, or in our Jungle discussion.