Someone over in the MailChimp Jungle asked, “Do spam filters read Alt-text descriptions?” I honestly had no idea, so I took my most recent MonkeyWrench email newsletter, replicated it, and I typed in the most awful, disgusting alt-text descriptions that I could think of.

Seriously, I had to wash my fingers after typing such nasty stuff, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for a day or two.

In addition to the yuckiness, I typed in a bunch of stuff about gambling, and some phishing type content. And I made sure to use all caps, with lots of exclamation points (see why spam filters hate that).

Then I ran it through our Inbox Inspector’s Spam Checker tool…

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We’re excited to announce that MailChimp now integrates with Freshbooks, to make staying in touch with all your customers painless. Basically, we’ve made it super easy to import your customers from your Freshbooks account into MailChimp. Then, you can send them email newsletters, event invitations, and autoresponders.

We’ll clean unsubscribes and bounces on MailChimp, and we’ll give you awesome reports to track your performance.

Freshbooks takes care of your billing, and MailChimp takes care of email marketing. Throw in a little Batchbook CRM, and you’ve got some kind of crazy-powerful “small business web” or something.

Here’s how it works…

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We first met local artist Chris Hamer (Myspace | Etsy) over in the MailChimp Jungle (see his profile), and fell in love with his work. So we asked him to “graffiti up” our office with some of his monsterific style. He’ll be visiting our headquarters and painting monkey-related monsters all over the place. Here’s some of his preliminary work:

Some sketches of more monkey-related monsters to come:

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At Farecompare.com, you can setup fare alerts, like “tell me if airfare for ATL to NYC drops by 20%.” Farecompare will check 3 times a day, and then instantly alert you if they detect the changes you’re looking for. They’re the first to offer such a service, and it’s extremely cool.

They use MailChimp’s API and our powerful dynamic merge tags to send these highly customized “transactional” emails.

Here’s what one of their email alerts looks like:

Now let’s take a look at how they use MailChimp’s dynamic merge tags to get this done…

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The MailChimp Academy is now available as a free video podcast on iTunes, under their software/how-to directory.

Just search for “MailChimp Academy” in the iTunes store, then hit subscribe (or, this link should go to it directly in iTunes).

You’ll get new MailChimp tutorials as we add them, and you can sync them with your iPod or iPhone, and learn MailChimp on the go!

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