Good news. In v5.9, we started taking your list’s user-agent data and displaying it next to each email app in the “Run Inbox Inspection” dialog:

So now I know I should prioritize my testing on Outlook, Gmail and Thunderbird (I’ll tell you why I skipped iPhone in a sec)…

We also added user agent stats to the full Inbox Inspection results:

Under each screenshot, we show you how many people on your list (whose user agents we can measure) use that app:

We all want our emails to render perfectly everywhere, but that’s not always feasible. This should help you make better decisions on which email apps to prioritize your coding time for. I’m probably not going to spend a ton of time optimizing for those 9 Lotus Notes 8.5 users when I’ve got almost 500 using Outlook to worry about.

A Note on User Agent Tracking

In order for your subscribers’ email client to be detected, it needs to make a request to our server so we can track it. That really only occurs during an open or a click. Tracking opens can be tricky (See: How Open Tracking Works), and clicks are naturally harder to obtain than opens (See: Average click rates by industry). So a lot of user agents will be under represented. As with all stats, take this with a little grain of salt.

The interesting thing about the iPhone is that it loads images in email by default, whereas most other clients automatically block images by default. So the iPhone is probably going to be over represented in your stats.

Related:

• Inbox Inspections are now free

But we’re pretty excited to announce that we’re now making Inbox Inspections totally free…

In order to make this happen, we had to make some big changes. So if you’re a heavy user of this feature, you’ll want to read all the details below. Also, there’s a slight catch to all this, but dont’ worry: it’s only temporary (more on that below too).

10 Most Used Email Programs

In general, running an Inbox Inspection works the same as always. You build your campaign, then hit the “run inspection” button:

You’ll notice there’s no more “you have x number of inspections remaining” and there’s no upsell option to “buy more inspections.” That’s because they’re free now (duh).

The campaign previews are being processed by a new service provider, Litmus. Because of some differences to the way their API works, you’ll probably notice that everything feels a little zippier than before.

After you click the “Run Inbox Inspection” button, you get this:

That’s the first big change. Before, we just generated a ton of screenshots. It was cool to see how your email looks in all kinds of crazy email apps around the world, but if nobody on my list checks email from Japan’s “Goo” client, I really don’t want to deal with (or wait for) that particular screenshot. I really just want to know what my email looks like in the most popular email programs for my subscriber list. So now, MailChimp uses that cool user-agent report (launched last July) to determine what the 10 most used email programs are for your list.

And those are the 10 screens we show by default.

For one of my campaigns, the 10 most popular email programs in all the different variations provided by Litmus yielded 32 screenshots:

For example, you get all the different variations of Outlook 2003 you’d expect:

with images on, images off, plus what it looks like inside the preview pane (with images on/off).

Full Program Views

Previously, we showed you only the email portion, and had a dotted line where it was cut off on the screen. Now, you get a “full program” view of what it looks like inside the email app. In the case of Hotmail, which extracts Youtube clips and displays them separately from your email (um, at the top), this makes a huge difference:

Explorer vs. Firefox

For webmail apps, like Gmail, Hotmail, etc., we now display what it looks like in both Internet Explorer and Firefox:

Apple Mail (hallelujah)

Inbox Inspections now include Apple Mail, too:

Web-based Views

And you’ll notice a variant where we display how your email’s subject line looks within the inbox of different email programs:

Above, you can see where my subject gets cut off by Gmail.

Manual Override

If you have the need to see your email rendered in some other email program (let’s say I wanted to check Lotus Notes or the iPad), there’s a “manual client selection” checkbox:

which expands to reveal all your different options. Keep in mind that in any given inspection that you run, we’ll only do 10 at a time. If you want more reports, they’re still free, but you’ll have to run them manually again. I’ll be honest with you: this is solely to keep that delicate balance between freemium and moochium in check. This is free for you, but not free for us.

New Previews and Spam Filter Checks

Here’s a list of all the campaign previews available:

1. Outlook 2007
2. Outlook 2003
3. Yahoo! Mail (Explorer)
4. Yahoo! Mail (Firefox)
5. Android 2.2Gmail (Firefox)
6. Hotmail (Explorer)
7. Apple Mail 4
8. Hotmail (Firefox)
9. iPhone
10. Plain Text
11. Symbian S60
12. Thunderbird 2.0
13. Thunderbird 3.0
14. Outlook 2010
15. Me.com (Firefox)
16. Outlook 2000
17. Outlook 2002/XP
18. Windows Mobile 6.5
19. Gmail (Explorer)
20. BlackBerry Text
21. BlackBerry HTML
22. AOL Mail (Firefox)
23. Apple Mail 3
24. iPad
25. Lotus Notes 7
26. Lotus Notes 8
27. Lotus Notes 8.5
28. Lotus Notes 6.5
29. AOL Mail (Explorer)

And here are all the spam filter checks available:

1. Gmail
2. Outlook
3. Barracuda
4. MessageLabs
5. Postini
6. Mail.com
7. FastMail
8. Hushmail
9. Lycos
10. Mobile Me
11. GMX
12. Yahoo! Mail

Smart Folder Under /Reports

Under the Reports section in your account, you’ll see a new smart folder, where we store all your Inbox Inspections in one convenient place:

And We’re Not Done Yet

For now, Inbox Inspections are free so long as you’re a customer on a monthly plan or if you’re a Creative Agency Partner. Yeah, we know. But we had to do it this way, because of time constraints (on our part). Long term, we want users to know that our  plan is to bundle the Inbox Inspector with our free Delivery Doctor feature, and to make this a comprehensive testing suite that’s available as an a la carte feature for pay-as-you-go (PAYG) customers too. For now, any PAYG or monthly user that had Inbox Inspection credits in their account will see them converted to Monkey Rewards points, which can be used to buy email credits (or you can save the points to buy inspections when they’re available for you again).

See how your campaign will look on Nokia's N96 Series phone and more.

For the additional devices I mentioned above, instead of just getting a single image showing how your campaign will render, you’ll see a series of screenshots designed to simulate the action of a recipient scrolling from top to bottom when they read your email.

In addition, did you know that MailChimp can automatically create a mobile version of your campaign when you allow users to choose their preferred format? We’ll also automatically create a mobile friendly version of your campaign archive, which works with any mobile device that has a web browser.

BOL is one of the largest Brazilian ISPs and Terra is the leading ISP is most of the other Latin American countries.

You can see a couple screenshots from our test campaign after the jump.

BOL

Terra

TwitterKeys is a service developed by the folks over at The Next Web Blog that allows you to insert certain Unicode characters in your tweets. Instead of posting that you have a conference call and coffee date before you head to the airport this afternoon, you might tweet something like “☎ then ♨ before ☞ ✈” To address the challenge of trying to remember all these great characters, @bomega and @sandervdv created a bookmarklet that brings up a floating pop-up window with three tabs. Once you drag it to your web browser’s bookmarks toolbar for instant access, you simply double click on the character you want to use.  Just ⌘ c to copy and ⌘ v to paste in to Twitter.

As a Twitter evangelist myself, I added TwitterKeys to my bookmarks toolbar as soon as I found out about it– and especially since The Next Web uses MailChimp!  (To read more about that, check out our recent interview with Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, one of the founders of The Next Web.)  Since the bookmarklet was occupying such prime browser real estate, and with the ease of copying and pasting characters, I started sneaking them into IM conversations.  But my obsession didn’t end there.  Like a giddy pre-teenage girl, I started using  TwitterKeys anywhere and everywhere text was involved… including email subject lines!

click to download the TwitterKeys for email marketing compatibility chart (.pdf)

It didn’t occur to me that this was a big deal (in a good way), until I was talking to Ben about successfully making contact with some very prestigious MailChimp customers using subject lines like, “MailChimp ♥ Ubercool“.  I thought about the fact that these special characters might not render correctly on the receiving end, but at that point my attempts at making contact hadn’t been very successful.  I was starting to get bummed out and a little discouraged and figured it was worth a shot.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, and it was time to try something that would make my email stand apart from the crowd.  Email marketers take note: it worked; using TwitterKeys in my email subject lines produced the response I was looking for and dramatically improved email open rates.

In order to make sure my discovery was actually something to “write home about,” I ran a battery of tests using MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector.  Inbox Inspector allows you preview a campaign in all the major email clients, test spam filtering and check firewall compatibility before you send it out to your list.  So just to give you an idea, I ran inspections both with and without TwitterKeys characters in the subject line.  Then inspections with TwitterKeys in the body of the email but not the subject line and vice-versa.  What about multiple TwitterKeys characters in the subject?  Was there any relation between TwitterKeys and spam filtering?  How about multiple TwitterKeys in the subject line, the body of the email, and no other discernible text?  You get the point here:
e x t e n s i v e  testing.

One of my most surprising discoveries was the fact that these special characters don’t have any impact on spam filtering, meaning that if you use them, your email is no more likely to be filtered out and classified as spam.  This is great news for email marketers!  I’ve compiled my findings into a one page chart that you can download and use as a reference.  It’s broken down by email client, and I’ve listed whether TwitterKeys work in the subject line (yes or no), as well as which characters (if any) will render in the body of the email.  One thing to note, however, is that TwitterKeys almost never work in plain text emails.  MailChimp allows you to copy the text from your HTML email and use it for the plain text version as a time-saving tool– just remember you’ll have to replace any TwitterKeys symbols with the actual words they represent.