ResultsMail does not provide lists nor refer to list providers. The best way to gather email addresses is to request email addresses from your current customers and place a form on your website where visitors can sign up to receive your newsletter.

Passwords are case-sensitive and can be difficult to type in. This is for your security. Please use your mouse to copy and paste the username and password directly from the email you have received into the login form.

Please go to the login screen and click on the I Can't Remember My Password link. There you will need to enter the email address that is associated with your account and click submit. It will send you your username and password.

The email of your username and password is sent as soon as you complete registration. If you have not yet received it, it is probably delayed by one of the email servers between yours and ours. Please wait another 30 minutes - 1 hr. or so and see if it comes in. If you have an anti-spam filter running it may have also been moved to your junk folder or deleted. Please check there as well, or try adding resultsmail.com as an approved sender and use the I can't remember my password link on the login page to have it re-sent.

Between the hours of 8am - 5pm PST, the approval process is usually very quick. Outside of these hours it may take longer.

We do not list prices above 100,000 messages because we prefer to discuss higher volume usage directly. Please contact us for pricing.

Please first review all of the questions in this FAQ to see if your questions are answered here. If they are not, please send an email to our support staff via the online support form. Ask your questions in the email and leave your phone number. Our support staff will answer questions via email and call you back if the questions require further elaboration.

ResultsMail does not maintain lists. Lists are maintained independently by the companies that use ResultsMail for their mailings. If you receive an email from a ResultsMail customer, the footer will contain the message, If you do not wish to receive future e-mail from CompanyName, please click here. Clicking where it says click here will remove you from that company's list.

We do not currently offer a "white label" version of ResultsMail because of the possibility of confusion that could create. Since the emails are sent off of our servers the header information contains "resultsmail.com". If we were to remove the up front notification that your email was being sent by a third party then you run the risk of being charged under the CAN-SPAM law for sending illegal bulk email based on the headers not matching the domain in the message's from address. While it could be proven in court that the headers we not forged, we are not willing to take on the additional risk and cost associated with defending such a position at this time.

If you need to upgrade your account you may send a request via our online support form. Accounts may be upgraded any time prior to the close of your current monthly billing cycle.

If you find that you are sending less that your current contract level, you may send a request via our online support form. Your account will be downgraded starting with the next monthly billing cycle.

You may cancel by sending a request via our online support form. Your account will be cancelled starting with the next monthly billing cycle. Please note that you since you are billed at the end of each monthly billing cycle, you will still receive another bill after canceling.

No, there are no setup fees.

Pricing is based on how many email messages you send per month. If you send out one email campaign to a list of 1,000 contacts, that is 1,000 messages. If you send out 2 email campaigns to the same list of 1,000 contacts, that is 2,000 messages.

With ResultsMail you sign up for a monthly volume plan based on your expected monthly usage. These plans may be viewed here. You are then billed on a month to month basis at that rate until you either change it by requesting an upgrade or downgrade, or cancel your account.

Please note that at each level there is a small overage charge per email sent over the limit you sign up for. If you send significantly more than the level you sign up at it would make sense to upgrade. Upgrades will be made effective immediately upon receipt of the request and are retroactive to include the entire billing cycle during which the upgrade was requested.

Similar to telephone or other internet service you are billed monthly at the usage level you sign up for until you request otherwise. Your monthly billing cycle starts on the day you sign up and continues through to that day of each month (i.e. 5th of May to 4th of June, 5th of June to 4th of July, etc.) If you would like to downgrade or cancel you may do so prior to the close of a monthly billing cycle and the request will be made effective in the next monthly billing cycle.

ResultsMail bills at the end of every month. Cancellation requests must be made prior to the commencement of the next monthly billing cycle. If you made your cancellation request during a billing cycle, you will still be billed at the end of that current billing cycle.

If you would like to import these contact to send to, follow these steps:

1. Go to contacts and add a group.
2. Go to import contacts and download the ResultsMail CSV Import Template.
3. Open the import template in Excel and copy and paste the contact information into its corresponding column. The only column that is required is the email address. The others are there for you if you would like to use them.
4. Save the template file without changing or removing any of the column headers or any columns, make sure it is saved as a CSV. The best way to do this is to just click save without re-naming it. If Excel asks you if you are sure, click yes.
5. In import contacts, select the group you recently created, click browse to find the template file you just saved, and then click the submit button.

The most common cause of failure in imports is either a missing column or column header that has been changed.

Please note that although the only required column is email, the other columns and column headers must remain in place for the import to work.

Please follow these steps:

1. Download a new copy of the import template from the Import Contacts page.
2. Copy and paste your contacts into the new template, one column at a time.
3. Save the file, making sure you have selected CSV (MS-DOS) as the file type. If Excel asks you if you are sure you want to save it in this format, click Yes.
4. Import the file.

Be careful not to remove any column headers or change them in any way.

During import you need to select to Not import email addresses that are already in another group.

If you export all of your contacts to Excel it will include a Subscribed column.  If there is a zero (0) in the subscribed column, it is unsubscribed.

This occurs when you have a very large list of contacts and your browser's connection to our servers times out in the process. We ask that you try your export one more time. If you continue to receive this error please send an email to our support team via our online support form for assistance.

There is no need to delete email addresses that have had a hard bounce. ResultsMail unsubscribes these for you. A hard bounce occurs when an email address can not be delivered because it either no longer exists on that email server or the domain itself does not exist. These are automatically unsubscribed from your list, so there is no need to delete. Deleting actually creates a problem because it makes it possible for you to accidentally import known bad addresses at a later date.

If you are attempting to delete email addresses that have had several soft bounces, you may export the list and then select just the email addresses and copy them. Go to Contact Options and select delete or unsubscribe and paste them in the box. Delete will remove them from your list, unsubscribe will flag them so they are never mailed to nor are they ever able to be re-imported and mailed to in the future. We recommend you use the unsubscribe option since you have determined you do not wish to keep attempting to deliver email to that address.

ResultsMail does not recommend deleting email addresses because this causes you to lose the unsubscribe and hard bounce history of the email addresses. This could leave you open to Federal fines of up to $11,000 per email sent to a previously unsubscribed contact.

If you are simply looking to re-shuffle the location of contacts, you can always go to Manage Groups and delete the current groups. This will drop your contacts into ungrouped. You may then import a new list to a new group. Any contacts that are in the new list and also in ungrouped will then be moved out of ungrouped and into the new group.

If you have added names or other data to your contacts that you would like to use in ResultsMail, you will need to delete the contacts first before you can re-import with the new data. This needs to be done carefully so that you do not delete unsubscribed contacts. If you have a group of contacts you would like to delete and replace, follow these steps:

1. Go to Contacts then Manage Groups and click on the head in the row of that group to view the contacts.
2. Click on the Export icon to Export to Excel.
3. Use Data > Sort to sort on the subscribed column.
4. Select only the email addresses of the contacts that have a 1 in the subscribed column, these are subscribed contacts, and copy them.
5. In ResultsMail, go to Contact Options and paste these contacts into the box, up to 500 at a time, and select to delete them.

Available shows you the groups that the contact is not a member of. Assigned shows the groups that the contacts has been assigned to. In the edit contact window you may click on an Available group to move it to assigned, thus assigning that contact to that group. You may also do the opposite to move a contact out of a group. The same holds true for selecting the groups to which your email campaign will be sent.

To use your own HTML in an email campaign, go to Campaigns and click on Create a New Campaign. This will open the campaign editor window. In the toolbar there is an HTML button. Click on this button to bring up the HTML source code in a separate window. In this window you may insert your HTML code and click Update.

This is most likely caused by a popup blocker running on your system. These can be within Internet Explorer itself, Google or Yahoo toolbars, antivirus or firewall software, etc. Please make sure to disable all popup blockers.

Please make sure to clear the cache of your browser by going to Tools > Internet Options, and deleting Temporary Internet Files.

Please also review both your Internet Security and Privacy settings, setting them to the lowest levels. Make sure that ActiveX components and Active Scripting are allowed, and make sure that cookies are allowed.

Please also make sure that the image you are attempting to upload is in a GIF or JPG file format, is in an RGB color mode, and is of a reasonable file size, i.e. less than 50k.

First, make sure your browser does not have any pop-up blockers installed and active while using our ResultsMail system. Pop-up blockers interfere with many aspects of our service.

Before uploading an image to your campaign, first verify that it is:

1. Saved as either a gif or jpg file.
2. Is in RGB color mode.
3. Is of a reasonable file size (i.e. less than 50k, < 20k is recommended).

Follow these steps to upload the image:

1. Click on the images icon or right-click on an image or in the message body and select ‘image properties’ from the right-click menu to open the Image Information window.
2. Click on the folder icon to the right of the Image URL field. This will open another window displaying your directory of images that you have stored on the ResultsMail® server.
3. To upload a new image, click on the “Browse” button at the top of the Image File Manager window to search on your own computer for the image you wish to upload. When you find the image on your computer, double-click it, or click it once and then click on the Open button.
4. Click on the Upload button to upload it. It will now appear in your list of files. You should then be able to click on the file name of the image to insert it into your campaign.

If the image does not appear in your campaign, it may be that the image you have selected is not in a .jpg or .gif format, or that it is too large for the screen. If the image is too large for use in your campaign you will want to edit the image. In the File Manager, to the right of the title of the image, click on the icon to edit the image. Editing the image will allow you to resize it as well as flip or rotate it.

Placing %firstName% %lastName% %companyName% %email% or %custom1% ... %custom5% will set up a merge mail variable that will pull the information from the database and insert it into the email.

This can be placed in the subject line or in the body of the email message.

When you do a test send of the message it will replace the variable with mergedFirstName instead of %firstName%. Since the test is not looking up names from the database it uses this as a flag to let you know it is working. Once you do the real send it will replace %firstName% with the first name of the recipient.

Once a campaign is sent it can not be deleted. The reason for this is so that you may have a complete log of all campaigns sent and be able to view the campaign exactly as it appeared when it went out. To easily manage your campaigns though you may use the various list management features we have in place such as limiting the number of rows displayed per page, using the filter, and using the sorting mechanisms.

The ResultsMail logo in the footer is a requirement of the service that cannot be removed. One of the key tenets of the U.S. Federal CAN-SPAM act is that it bans false or misleading header information. Since you are sending emails from our servers, recipients can easily discover that while the sender email address refers to your website or domain, the messages was sent from resultsmail.com. Having the logo in place makes this transparent and keeps your email messages in compliance with the law.

When pasting in HTML code you need to click on the HTML button in the toolbar to pull up the HTML source code. You may paste your HTML code into that window and click Update to see it rendered in the editor.

The problem is you have all of your images referencing your own hard drive. So when you see it on your own computer they show up but when you send it they won't. What you need to do is:

1. Right click on the image.
2. Select image.
3. In the new small window that pops up, click on the folder button to the right of the source location field.
4. Another small window will pop up that shows you image files that have been uploaded into your account.
5. From here click on Upload.
6. Click on Browse to find the image you want to upload, and check the box that says "Insert the image into the editor after its uploaded." and then click 'OK'.
7. That should replace your image as you've pasted it with a successfully uploaded image to our server so that it appears in your email.

Images on the Internet are displayed at 72 DPI. This number is rather irrelevant though in working with email campaigns. When you are editing images you should focus only on the actual pixel width and height rather than its relationship to inches. The relationship of pixels to inches is of importance to print design, but when designing for the web you should think all in pixels.

Hotmail does not support CSS (style sheets) nor does Hotmail support extended character sets. This is a known issue with Hotmail and is not controlled by our software.

To mitigate these problems we recommend that you do not use extended character sets in your emails (such as MS Word's curly quotes and long hyphens) and that you define your HTML styles using FONT tags and other HTML 3.2 standards.

MS Word will often insert characters into the HTML code that cause problems in many software programs, including Hotmail. To mitigate this problem we recommend copying the text you have in MS Word and pasting it into Notepad then copying it from Notepad and pasting it into ResultsMail.

If you continue to have problems with strange characters appearing after copying text from MS Word, another area to look at is the "smart quotes" that MS Word inserts by default. You may turn these off in MS Word by going to Tools and AutoCorrect then AutoFormat As You Type. Here you will see the options for turning off the automatic replacement of standard quotes with smart quotes and standard hyphens with long dashes.

A key element to creating an HTML email that may be easily read by any email client is to design in a very standard HTML. If you are using FrontPage as your design tool you will want to be sure to set FrontPage to not use CSS 2.0 (positioning) so that it uses HTML tables and not CSS to layout your design. A good page for describing this may be found here.

All links are automatically converted from your HTML to be tracked by our system. All you have to do is make sure it is a valid HTML link within your code and our system will handle the rest when you send a campaign to your contact list.

The forward to a friend feature is currently under development.

The footer information cannot be altered. It is provided to help make sure each message is compliant with all federal laws.

When you send a "test" message we send you both the HTML and the plain text version separately. This is so that you can preview how both appear before you send a campaign to your contact list. When you send a campaign to your contact list only one message is sent. This message includes both the plain text and the HTML version. The version displayed to the recipient is then determined by the recipient's software and settings.

The email campaigns is sent in a multi-part MIME message that includes both a plain text and HTML version of the email. If the recipient's email software can properly render HTML, they will see the HTML. If it cannot, they will see plain text.

In Campaigns, please go to Manage Senders. There you may edit the FROM name that appears when your email is sent. If you would like to send from a different email address, please use Add a Sender.

Adding senders is generally immediate unless there are problems with your receiving email server.

Go to the Account section in ResultsMail and change the mailing address. This is the address that shows up in the footer of every message.

Emails are sent from our highly efficient email servers. This ensures that your campaigns will be sent quickly with a high rate of deliverability.

We do not guarantee delivery time do to the nature of the Internet and the many variables involved in delivery many messages to many different servers.

In general, when you send a campaign, 80 - 85% of your messages will be sent within the first 10 minutes, and 95% within the first hour.  The rest trickle out over the next 30 hours as the server continues to retry sending your mail to receiving servers that are unresponsive.  Every hour the server reports on bounces. So within 1-2 hours of sending your campaign you should have a good picture of which emails have bounced and which have been delivered. 

Definitely not based on the Federal Trade Commission's definition of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Here's what the law ( http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.htm ) says: When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it's illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list." Each violation of the above provisions is subject to fines of up to $11,000.

When you send a "test" message and manually enter an email address the unsubscribe link is not active. The intended purpose of sending test messages is to send them to a handful of email addresses to verify that your message is properly formatted and working as intended. As such, we trust that you are the one in control of those email addresses and wouldn't really want to unsubscribe them. The complete standard footer is included on the email, however, so that you may test every aspect of the message. The unsubscribe option only works when you send an actual campaign using the "send campaign" option and choose a group of contacts to send to. When a person unsubscribes after receiving an email this way they are unsubscribed immediately.

Open can only be tracked for HTML emails which the recipient opened while connected to the internet.

Undetermined therefore is everything else except bounced messages. For example, plain text emails that are received, html emails that are read while the user is offline, or emails that are never opened are all undetermined. These messages are delivered but we just have no tracking data on them beyond that, thus the status "undetermined".

An Undetermined message is a message that has been delivered but we have not received any feedback as to what the recipient did with the message. This usually happens when they have received the message but did not open it.

We refer to these as undetermined rather than unopened because it can also happen when the recipient's software is only capable of viewing the plain text version, their email software does not view images, their email software has suppressed the images, or they opened the email while not connected to the Internet.

According to the most recent industry trend report run by DoubleClick, out of more than 2.5 billion messages sent by several hundred different customers in Q3 of 2005, the average open rate was 26.9%. Their calculation is based on total delivered as: Opened / (Total Sent - Bounces).

There are several key factors to increasing your open rate, here are some you may wish to look into:

1. The From Sender Name: The name and email address you send from need to be immediately recognizable to the recipient. The name is the most important determinant for a recipient as to whether or not they open the message.
   
   
2. The Subject line: The subject line must capture their attention. A subject line that makes the email look like any other newsletter they may disregard will be disregarded.
   
   
3. Frequency of sending: If messages are sent too frequently the recipients will ignore them and not open. If they are sent too infrequently they will forget who you are and not open. The balance depends on the type of messages you send and your audience.
   
   
4. Spam filters: Spam filters are increasingly more difficult to pass. Elements that will get you caught in a spam filter include the use of free email services for your sender address (e.g. yahoo, hotmail, etc.), the use of exclamation points or words like "Free" "Viagra" "Work at home" etc., as well as the use of large images and very little text. The Internet is full of resources for learning what will get you caught in a filter and some websites even have downloadable software for checking the spam score of your email.
   
   
5. Image Suppression: ResultsMail reports opens based on the downloading of images from our servers. For this to happen, the recipient must open and view the HTML version of the email while connected to the Internet. Email programs such as Outlook and webmail readers will by default suppress images. If the recipient does not click on the link to download the images, an open cannot be recorded.

   This means that if you send an email that only has one large image and no text, they may not select to view the image because they do not see anything in the email. Conversely if the email you send does not include images, the recipient will not feel a need to click the link to download images and so the ResultsMail open recording image will not be downloaded and an open will not be recorded. To increase open rates, it is therefore necessary to design good HTML emails that include text and images and encourage the recipient to download the images.

Email addresses are logged when there is an action, e.g. open, click, bounce, or unsubscribe. We do not log every email address that successfully receives an email but does not open it.

In order to view a list of undetermined addresses you would need to export the contacts from the groups you sent the email to, and then subtract the email addresses that opened or bounced on that campaign.

To do this you could use Contact Options and paste in the email addresses that opened or bounced and select to move them to a new group. Then the original group will be decreased by that number and only contain the email addresses that did not open or bounce.

The clicked through summary shows you which links were clicked and which were most popular. Viewing details on this report shows you specifically who clicked on what link.

The dark red strikethrough is shown on a contact when it has been automatically unsubscribed because it had a hard bounce and was determined to be undeliverable. The orange strikethrough is shown on a contacts that unsubscribed themselves by clicking on the unsubscribe link or that you have unsubscribed through the contact manager.

Unfortunately ResultsMail does not currently support the use of attachments. The reason for this is that attachments typically make the total email size very large. The larger the email that is delivered the more likely it is to be blocked, cause clogged inboxes, etc. Therefore, for the sake of increased deliverability we do not support attachments. Instead you would need to place the document up on your website and create a link within your ResultsMail email campaign to have people download the document. The added benefit of this approach is that the recipient will only need to download the document if they are interested in it and you will be able to track via the ResultsMail reports how many recipients have clicked through to retrieve the document.

Yes. You could include the sender's name in one of the custom fields and then use the merge to bring it in as %custom1% or %custom2% , etc.

The "Tools" section under "Account" provides two HMTL forms you can use to set up on your website to gather email address subscriptions. You may copy and paste this code into your website. The simple form includes the field for just the email address and the complete form includes all of the available fields for a contact. On the complete form you may use as many or as few fields as you wish. The only required field is email. In the complete form you will find a <select> field for the group that includes all of the groups you have created in ResultsMail as options. You may remove some of these options to limit the groups that a contact may subscribe to and in this way use it as a method of segmenting your list. You may also specify a group in a hidden field by inserting <input type="hidden" name="group" value="Group Name"> where Group Name is replaced with the group you would like to specify for the subscriber. This way you can force subscribers on particular forms into specified groups. Please see the online documentation located within your ResultsMail account for more detailed instructions.

Go to Accounts, then to Settings.  There you will find the field where you may set the redirect routing of both the subscribe form and for unsubscribes as well.

That verification page you receive only goes to whoever you set up as a Sender (FROM) email address.  Your recipients will never see that.