email marketing

Letterpop is an amazing AJAX/Web 2.0 online newsletter creator.  You can choose from a number of templates and upload your own images and photos.  One of the nicer features is that you do not need to create an account to create a basic newsletter, so it’s really easy to give this app a no strings attached test drive. More and more people are starting to use newsletters as a more direct way of reaching their audience, especially if their blog or website is part of a larger business model.

Newsletters that  feature high-quality content do tend to get sent to the receiver’s inbox and in turn opened a very high percentage of the time, and whatever your motive for creating them is you need a good tool. If you’ve been thinking about it take a look at Letterpop.

Do you find the text ads in GMail to be annoying? If you do, you can use Firefox to hide the ads from displaying.

This trick uses CSS and the Firefox configuration file named userContent.css . Before we start modifying our userContent.css file, I would recommend that you install an extension named ChromeEdit that simplifies the process of modifying your Firefox configuration files. So before you enter the CSS code listed below, go and install this extension (note: you’ll need to restart your browser after installation, so you may want to bookmark this page).

Now that you have CromeEdit installed, click on the Firefox Tools menu and then click on the menu item labeled Edit User Files. A new window will appear that has five tabs across the top. Click on the tab that is labeled userContent.css. Next copy the CSS code below and paste it into the userContent.css file, then click the Save button.

#rh table[class=”metatable”]{display: none !important;}
#rh div[class=”c”] {display: none !important;}

Now, restart your browser and open GMail – the ads are gone!

The above rules make use of the *!important* property value to override any rules that may already exist within the page that is being loaded. In the first rule, GMail has an element with an id of rh and we are setting the tables that have a class equal to metatable within that element, to not display (ie . display:none)

A word of caution, we are only hiding the ads from displaying. They are actually still there, just not visible. This means that Google is still indexing your email messages to provide you with “targetted ads”. It is also worth noting that as this hack is based upon creating CSS rules for existing GMail code, it is very possible that this hack will break as GMail continues to evolve.