LetterPop: Quick and easy HTML newsletters
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
As everyone knows, Mail.app doesn’t offer a default option for composing HTML emails. No one feels neutral about this; people either love or hate it.
If you fall into the latter category, check out LetterPop 
, a new HTML newsletter creation web app, which promises another option to existing workarounds like these three (“Composing HTML messages in Mail.app”) or using TextMate as an external editor.
It was recently hyped by Lifehacker as “the first must-see web app of 2007″.
The app is essentially a web-based WYSIWIG HTML editor. Once you have created an account, you can upload images and shoe-horn them into a limited number of templates, mainly of the “What I did on my holidays” variety. The templates also offer a varying number of test boxes for your news.
Create a mailing list by adding contacts to the address book in your LetterPop account (a nice quick-add feature is provided), and a mail-out about your flash newsletter is just a few button presses away.
Recipients don’t actually get a copy of the newsletter though. They get an invitation to visit the LetterPop web site and view it there:
It has just launched and is a true “Web 2.0″ beta (the only one apart from Stikkit ?), so you may find your artistic options restricted.
Still, you can quickly knock out something respectable:
One note of warning: The number of Safari-unfriendly sites is declining, but this is one. I had to use Firefox to upload images.
LetterPop is free. Privacy mavens may want to consider the site’s privacy policy which contains the following statements:
81 miles may, at its discretion, use this information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.
and
In the course of operating our business it may be necessary or appropriate for us to provide access to your personal information to others such as our service providers, contractors and select vendors so that we can operate 81 Miles and other related entities. Where practical, we seek to obtain confidentiality agreements that are consistent with this policy and that limit others’ use or disclosure of the information you have shared.
[Via DownloadSquad ]
