Pivotal IQ Blog

What you see isn't always what you will get, or more accurately, we will always reap what we sow in the realm of email rendering. Let's take for instance the very secretive and proprietary rendering that happens behind the scenes in older Blackberry's—they perform a kind of digital alchemy on email turning gold into lead. Yes you read that correctly, I didn't just have a moment of dyslexia, your beautiful golden emails are turned into textual lead on Blackberry 2.x hand held devices.

An article in the Wall Street Journal today begins that "Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over."... "In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold--services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world."

Say whaaaat?

If anything, email is re-inventing itself as the killer app in the emerging 3.0 world of multi-platform digital communications. There are at least three mega-trends occurring that indicate email is experiencing a Renaissance; not an apocalypse:

Pivotal Veracity's deliverabability tracking technology recently enabled us to catch an error with AOL's spam filters that has been causing a higher than normal amount of email from good senders to be placed in customers' spam folders.

eBay and PayPal teamed up with Gmail this summer to introduce "Supertrustworthy Email" -- a new class of email that has been thoroughly authenticated using DKIM and is indicated to end users as "supertrustworthy" via a small key icon displayed alongside the sender's logo in the message header. At the time of the announcement, Gmail said that eBay and PayPal were the first and only senders who's messages Gmail has deemed worthy of the icon and logo-display, but that they'd be rolling it out to other senders in the future who are susceptible to phishing attacks.

With mobile email readership exploding, marketers are increasingly looking for advice on how to optimize their communications for the small screen.  Unfortunately, it can be difficult to sort fact from fiction with the gluttony of information out there. Here are the top 5 myths—and realities—of mobile email marketing.

Myth 1 – Include a TEXT part, that’s what your readers will see!

What good is a standard if nobody follows it? I've asked myself this question numerous times and have come up with the earth shattering realization, wait for it—it's no good. In the wild west of HTML and CSS there seems to be no sherif in town; designers are faced with the perpetual problem of creating code based on a standard that may or may not be supported, rendering wise, by the receiving ISP/desktop software/mobile device. The problem can be summed up like this: "how can I achieve the most uniform rendering across the greatest number of email clients?"