Hi *|MERGE1|*,

We've got a planned server outage coming up, plus a couple quick improvements to tell you about...

Big Server Upgrade January 27-28th.
On the last weekend in January (the 27th and 28th), we're going to be adding another server to make MailChimp run faster. This is our biggest server upgrade ever, and will require that that we take the entire system down for the weekend (sorry, but it's the only way).

So if you have campaigns scheduled for the 27th or 28th of January, please re-schedule them.

After the new server is in place, MailChimp will be capable of performing some really cool new tricks, which we'll tell you about soon.

Archived Email Campaigns
From now on, whenever you build a campaign in MailChimp, we'll automatically save a copy of it on our server, so you can link to it (see screenshot below).

Pretty handy if your HTML email gets mangled when it was forwarded to someone else, or if the recipient doesn't know how to "turn images on" in their email program. Recipients can always just view a copy of your campaign in their browser now. Interesting side note: this "view it in your browser" link is always the most-clicked link in every MailChimp campaign we send.

So for those of you who've been uploading copies of every campaign to your server, you don't have to do that anymore. We've just saved you 5 minutes of time per campaign! So use that time to hug a baby, or go outside and smell a flower, or call your mother.

Oh, we've automatically placed this link for you in the top bar of all our built-in email templates. So all new templates you create in our designer will include this link by default. And for those of you who prefer to design and code your own templates, you'll just need to use our new "ARCHIVE" merge tag in your code (see sample code in the screenshot above).

Improved Template Rendering
The folks at Yahoo!Mail, AOL Webmail, Windows Live Mail, .Mac, and Gmail are using some really fancy "AJAX" technology to make their browser-based applications behave like desktop applications (so you can drag and drop stuff, get instant feedback, etc without refreshing the page). That's really cool, but those email services are starting to really mangle HTML email now (generally speaking, they're not all that CSS-friendly anymore).

And since we're seeing more and more people switching to these browser-based email services, we decided to re-program all our built-in HTML email templates.

So moving forward, you should see your emails rendering a lot better in browser-based email programs. We made this retroactive, so don't worry---you won't have to re-design any of the templates you've already designed in MailChimp.

For those of you who are curious about the technical behind-the-scenes stuff, here's what's going on. For some reason, most of the new browser-based email services are stripping out embedded CSS. It isn't directly because of the AJAX. We think it's simply because they fear you might be defining CSS classes with the exact same names that they are in their pages. That would obviously screw things up for their interfaces. So to be safe, they're simply stripping out all embedded CSS. That's our theory, anyway. We'll be discussing this more in the upcoming MonkeyWrench.

You can learn more about AJAX from Adaptive Path, then read this cool article from Aarron Walters about how you can Use AJAX and PHP to Build your Mailing List (Aarron's a fellow MailChimp user, BTW).

As always, contact us if you have any questions about MailChimp. Click the "Live Chat" button in your account, or email us.

Regards,
The MailChimp Team

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