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For a lot of our customers, placing your subscribe form on the front page of your site (or on every page for that matter) is an important method for encouraging as many people as possible to sign up.

The only problem is, you don't want to overload these pages with a bulky form, so you end up only asking for a name and email address. For a lot of you guys, this is enough. But if your interested in a quick and easy way to capture additional info and still keep a small form on your main pages, then read on.

If you want to capture the extra details for every new subscriber, then you should change the subscribe form on the front page to submit to a second page on your site. This will then pass the subscribers name and email address in to the real subscribe form where you can capture all details. Derek offers a number of suggestions on dealing with this issue, namely:

• Designing and testing your emails to get the message across even when images are turned off.
• Getting added to the recipients address book, bypassing the problem altogether for the majority of email clients.

Quick background, print stylesheets basically allow you to set a different set of CSS rules when you print the page to the one you see when viewing it on screen. For more details, check out Eric Meyer's great intro. By specifying a print stylesheet for our newsletters, we could ensure when a subscribers prints our email they see a much more print friendly email that might use simpler formatting and even hide some elements of the email itself. I've seen quite a few mentions about the growing problem of image based spam on the web and unfortunately in my inbox of late. I knew image-based spam was getting worse, but this statistic in a recent USA Today article blew me away: Image-based spam accounts for 21% of all spam, compared with just 1% in late 2005.

It's only a matter of time before spam content filters respond by coming down even harder on predominantly image based HTML emails. With the difficulties of coding a consistent design across all email environments, it's little surprise that some designers are still opting for an image-heavy approach to their emails. With the continued popularity of email clients turning off remote images by default, and the continual tightening of content filtering rules, this just isn't an option any more.As many of you have noticed, we has been behind of sending follow-up and broadcast messages. This has been caused by a bug that our e-mail server run into around 20th of July, causing a great slow down when it comes to sending out e-mails (the bug did not affect instant autoresponses and your database). To make things worse, on 18th of August I left for a two week vacation (until 1st of August) to Tenerife, Canary Islands. The fact that Tenerife has really slow Internet access (compared with the continental Europe) has greatly reduced my capability to fix the problem. I've fixed the bug this morning and from now on the follow-ups and broadcasts will be delivered on time and we hope to have caught up with the delivery of past follow-up messages as soon as possible. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to you.