Web designers and developers: ever help a client with an email marketing project, then started to get this weird, uneasy feeling in your stomach that maybe—just maybe—you were helping your client spam? You were probably more concerned about your karma, but did you know it can also hurt your client’s email reputation (and potentially yours?). Once that happens, good luck getting your email delivered, no matter what server or service you’re using.

At MailChimp, we’ve had to shut down quite a few creative agencies for their client’s bad email habits. Sadly, most problems could have been easily prevented.

We’ve posted a free PDF guide (9 pages): Warning Signs Your Client Is Spamming.

The free downloadable guide covers how to tell if your client is crossing the line, and how to gently guide them back over from the dark side (without losing the project). More specifically, we go over:

• The most common reasons we’ve had to shut down agency accounts at MailChimp
• The industries (your clients) that always seem to have the most risk (and why)
• How to define spam in words your client will understand, and how to determine when a client just needs a punch in the gut
• How to detect inexperienced clients who may be doing things to get themselves (and you) in trouble

With all the work on V3, we’ve gotten a little behind on official MailChimp news.

We’ve joined the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance, alongside companies like Bank of America, IronPort, Verisign, ReturnPath, and Symantec.

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Everyone at the office here is having a fun time coming up with random quotes that MailChimp can say whenever you log in (seriously, it’s like the longest discussion in our Basecamp account ever).

Here’s an example:

and a tribute to lolcats:

What’s really creepy is I got a haircut yesterday, then logged in and got this:

How’d we do that? Perhaps the engineers are playing pranks on me.

Anyway, if you’ve got an idea for a random MailChimp welcome message, post a comment below. We’ll plug it into the interface. We’ve got customers from all over the world, so personally, I’d love it if we could get some local attitude in there.

Strongmail reports that AOL is filtering email based on your hard bounces. The basic idea is if you’ve got way too many hard bounces, you’ve got bad list hygiene, and they don’t want you sending email to their servers.

If you’re using MailChimp’s managed lists, we automagically clean hard bounces from your list immediately, to prevent this sort of thing. If you manage your list by hand in some excel file, and you manually remove bounces and unsubscribes “whenever you can get to them,” you’re going to have problems (and not just with AOL).  If you’re sending your very first email campaign to an old list you’ve been collecting for years, you should remove any contacts older than 1 year, and then send your campaign in small chunks.

On a related note, here are “average email bounce rates by industry.”

Also, the new MailChimp reports will show you what your bounce rate is by ISP:

We’ll be launching the new MailChimp soon, and it’s going to be a huge server migration.

How will we keep customers up to date on the progress of our server outage? We can’t post updates on our website. It’ll be temporarily down. We can’t send you emails. It’ll be temporarily down.

Twitter is where we’ll be posting minute-by-minute updates on what’s going on during server migration (and whatever else is happening at The MailChimp Intergalactic Headquarters):

http://www.twitter.com/mailchimp