Please buy PhoneTag and integrate their transcription technology immediately. That is all.

V/R,

Calmighty

All that changed yesterday.  I never thought I would say this, but please leave me voice mail!  I just discovered a service called PhoneTag.  PhoneTag intercepts your voice mail (you actually transfer your voice mail service to them) then transcribes the message into text.  The service then emails the text of the message to you and attaches the original message as a WAV audio file if you really want to listen to it.

The best part is that it is crazy accurate.  I received a 40 second message this morning that was letter perfect including punctuation — very impressive.

PhoneTag offers a free 30 day trial membership then you have paid options thereafter.  You can choose from a per message fee of $0.35 each, a flat fee of $9,95 for 40 messages ($0.25 each if you go over) or $29.95 per month for unlimited messages.

Give them a try.  If you sign up using the links here you’ll get 30 days free.

Sure, you can use Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail or whatever as your email provider and get good things like forwarding, your own domain, POP3 access, but if you want kick ass email you have to check out FuseMail. But, before you click, no it’s not free.

However, it is super affordable. At $0.99 per email account per month (minimum 10) and 1GB of storage, the price is looking right. But that’s not all. FuseMail has a ton of other sweet features. From a brand-able webmail client (that’s pretty slick I might add) to consolidating all of your other emails into one account to calendaring, contacts, notes, tasks, syncing — FuseMail has it all. Heck, I even use them as backup DNS for some of my sites. Their list of features is ridiculous. Heck, I even use them as backup DNS for some of my sites.

I’ve been using them for just over a year now and there service and support is hands down the absolute best. Disclaimer: I’m writing this because I love them. I don’t know anyone at the company and am not paid a cent by sending you their way.

If you are looking for a crazy, rock solid email provider, you can’t go wrong with FuseMail.

Trouble is, if you don’t have Adobe Acrobat (the full version not the reader) producing a PDF is going to cost you.  Or is it?  Well, judging by the title of this post there’s a way to do it free.

The is an open source project called PDFCreator that lets you print PDFs from any application that has print functionality.  And, it’s totally free as in beer.  I’ve been using PDFCreator for years.  Whether I want to deliver a proposal in a format that isn’t editable or provide a universally accessible version of any document or presentation, PDFCreator is a great solution.

Now, if you do need to edit or collaborate, you’ll need Acrobat, but for most uses PDFCreator will fill the bill.

Yesterday, I triggered an email campaign distributed to roughly 260,000 recipients.  I’ve done this in the past to a slightly smaller distribution without too much difficulty.  Not this time.  For my list, bounce backs come into an address that I download and move to a bounce folder using an Outlook rule.  I then siphon the email addresses associated with the bounces.  I then run a script against that file to opt those addresses out so that they don’t receive any further email.  It’s a pretty simple, cost-effective solution.

Well, I opened Outlook yesterday morning and saw I had about 65,000 messages to download!  Yikes!  In fact, if I had actually tried using Outlook to download them, I’d be downloading email for the next week.  So, I had to set up Outlook Express to download the messages.  The good thing about Outlook Express is that it is way faster than Outlook when it comes to message processing.  This is especially true if you have lots of rules or add ins running.

So, back to campaign management.  You can go a couple different ways here.  You can either outsource your email distribution, host and run your own solution or utilize a software as a service (SaaS) provider.  I’ve done all three in the past.  Outsourcing is very expensive, but you don’t have to do anything.  It’s nearly hands off once you are set up.  Using a SaaS set up is the next logical option.  It’s cheaper and you don’t have to invest in the hardware and software.  Generally, you pay a fee depending on how many messages you wish to send in a given month.  Obviously, with large lists, this can be pretty expensive.  Next, is licensing software and running your own server.  This isn’t for the faint of heart.  In my case, the distribution is sent by my server.  The good news is I have people a lot smarter than me managing it.  Deliverability is a huge concern and you need to get the necessary relationships in place with the major ISPs or your email will get blocked.  For that reason, you really don’t want to send messages, say, from your desktop to large lists.  Most ISPs will raise a red flag as soon as you start sending massive amounts of email.  Some of them will even suspend your Internet connection until they can figure out what the hell is going on.

Moreover, the biggest advantage of using a service or having list management software on your server is it takes all of the administrative overhead away.  Things like processing opt outs and bounces can be a huge pain.  The software takes care of this for you.  You don’t even have to think about it.

The downside is extracting the data from a database for your distribution segments and then maintaining those segments.  It’s tedious and time consuming.  Plus, you are still relying on a third party to get it right or for you to configure it correctly.

What solution do you employ to manage your email campaigns?  Tell me the good, bad and ugly — I’ll have a very empathetic ear.