The email links to the email service provider, not the actual link destination, to provide clickthrough metrics and measurements. When the email arrived in my inbox, this link redirected to the target, but now it redirects nowhere.

You might want to ask your email provider whether its links expire and consider whether the thing you’re emailing might be relevant beyond that time. With certain time-delimited offers, this isn’t a bad thing. But if you’re trying to drive traffic to your Web site generally or hope your featured whitepaper will get prospects now and in the future, it might behoove you to find an email provider whose links don’t.

What does it mean?

I think it means Amazon has joined the ranks of the indolent who don’t really care that much if their email marketing goes out rife with errors.

After all, so many others do. The users will forgive and forget.

Doesn’t it remind you of The Lovin’ Spoonful?

Of course not. You’re all pups.

It looks as though someone forgot to fill in an important noun in the mass market email programs’ Mad Libs.

If you’re offering this sort of service to a client, wherein he or she can roll-his-own using your backend technology, you are at the very least offering a service wherein your competent quality staff can look over the client work for a small additional fee, aren’t you?

If not, why not?

Email vendors are outside the reach of interactive agency QA in most cases, and it shows.

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Need a hint? Okay, if you fill out the form available here, the thank you page looks like this:

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So what’s missing from these items?

UPDATE A couple of you guys got it right out of the box: the asterisk appears on both items, but the footnote identifying the limitations does not.

You not only have to look at what’s before you when testing, but you have to look at what’s missing. You get that with not only experience or business knowledge in the area of the software you test, but also from real world experience or business knowledge from outside the domain. The domain can be a blinder, and you have to look above it.

Good work, guys.

You know, by including the link to see the Web page representing an e-mail as a Web page or including unsubscribe links when the static Web page that all viewers who click through see. Or to fail catastrophically like the guys at The Web Corner do with their Ace Hardware e-mails.

Here’s my e-mail as displayed as a Web page:

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Huh, it’s got my e-mail address in it, and I don’t see my e-mail address in the querystring. What I do see is a couple of numbers. And if I change one of those numbers….

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Hey, that ain’t me.

Okay, guys, what lessons have we been shown today that they will not learn this time, either?

• Maybe you should check to see if someone has rights to see something if they alter the querystring by changing an obvious parameter.
• Test your view as Web page option in your e-mails to see if maybe you’ve messed it up.

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Click that free reward button, and you get a reward all right. If you’re a tester, you want no bigger reward than a stack trace:

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As I mention ad nauseum (disclosure: Pepto Bismol pays me to do things ad nauseum), when you’re doing an e-mail campaign or working with an application that triggers the e-mails, you always need to send the e-mail to yourself to test it. Click the dagnabbitic links, dagnabbit.

In the interactive world, they call the test e-mail sent through the bulk e-mails the friendlies, which is exactly what I would call a horror film about QA: “The Friendlies”. At least that’s what they called them where I worked. Apparently, the agency behind this campaign never heard of them. Or they’ve seen the script for my film and think that sending out friendlies is akin to saying “Candyman” the third time.

Regardless. Test your e-mails. Click the links. Period.

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Well, Josh, since you went through all the trouble to send me your beta e-mail, here are a couple things:

• Your View as Web page offering needs work; the heading is not centered, etc.
• Capitalization of your alt text should match the images or captions.
• Your boilerplate footer has hard line breaks and does not stretch the width of the e-mail body.
• A box surrounds supporter image in Firefox, but not IE (applies to Web mail only, but might impact Thunderbird vs. Office).
• I did not sign up with Media Baby. You bought my e-mail from a list. Don’t lie to me.

Better luck with the next iteration, but if you want me to recheck or to review your future efforts, please contact me professionally (info available on the Sez Who? page) instead of sending your friendlies out to the list you purchased.

However, this one does it badly:

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The whole e-mail renders poorly when viewed through Hotmail, so I cannot tell if it’s a failure related to that or if someone forgot to copy part of the boilerplate before pasting into the new message. I can tell you, though, it ain’t right.